Using the broad definition of Gullah as anyone whose ancestors were enslaved in plantations from North Carolina to Florida. The strict definition is those from the coastal islands of South Carolina and Georgia. This is the background for many African Americans living all over the USA.
These results indicate that distinguishing genetic differences can be observed among ethnic groups residing in historically close proximity to one another. Furthermore, we observed some mitochondrial DNA haplotypes that are common among the Sierra Leone ethnic groups but have not been observed in other published studies of West African ethnic groups. Therefore, we may have evidence for mtDNA lineages that are unique to this region of West Africa.
Numerous historical documents suggest that Sierra Leone was a major source of slaves for the Southern United States. Approximately six percent of slaves bought through Charleston, SC during the final years of legal slave importation (1716 - 1807) emanated from Sierra Leone (Pollitzer, 1993). These African slaves were valued because of their knowledge of rice agriculture and were largely responsible for the financial success of Georgia and South Carolina rice plantations. Historical- and cultural evidence suggests that a Sierra Leone connection exists between the Gullah and Geechee communities of these states (Pollitzer, 1993). However, the people of Sierra Leone are ethnically diverse. The Mende and Temne ethnic groups, for example, each account for about 30% of the population. The remaining 40% of the population is divided among numerous smaller ethnic groups (Alie, 1990).
The Mende belong to a West African linguistic family called Mande. They were originally located in the Liberian hinterland but are believed to have begun arriving in Sierra Leone in the 18th century. The early Mende immigrants established groups of settlements based on agriculture and hunting. These settlements were usually founded by one or two families, together with their slaves and/or dependants. Often, a thick strip of forest, in essence a barrier that reduced genetic exchange, was left between one community and the next, partly to avoid friction and partly for protection in war. Initially, the village headman, or head of the dominant family, was probably the ultimate authority. Over time, warlords became absolute rulers because of their ability to conquer weaker villages as well as their ability to offer protection to such villages...... d.
The Temne belong to a West Atlantic group that probably migrated into Sierra Leone from Futa Jallon in present-day Republic of Guinea. These migrations began before the 15th century. By the time Portuguese explorers visited Sierra Leone’s shores from the 1440s, some Temne were already established in the Sierra Leone peninsula. The Temne claim descent from about 25 eponymous ancestors, and they bear the clan names of these ancestors. The clan names include: Bangura, Kargbo, Kamara, Koroma, Fonah, and Thula. Each clan is associated with a symbol or totem, often an animal, bird or plant that members of the clan are forbidden to see, touch, kill or eat. This form of prohibition differs and varies with each clan, and the penalty for non-observance or breach of the prohibition also varies. The clan name is transmitted from father to children and a woman belongs to the clan of her father.....
When an exact test of sample differentiation was performed, we found that the Mandinka sample had haplogroup frequencies that were significantly different from those of the other ethnic groups (Table 6). All other pairwise comparisons were significantly different as well, except for comparisons between the Mende and the Temne, Fulbe or Wolof samples. Haplotype sharing was common. Exceptions include 4 instances of an L3b1 haplotype (93, 223, 278, 362) that was found uniquely in the Fulbe sample and 6 instances of an L2a haplotype (148, 150, 223, 278, 294, 355, 390) that was found uniquely in the Mandinka sample (Watson et al., 1997). Also, an L2c2 haplotype (93, 126, 223, 264, 274, 278, 311, 390) and two L2d2 haplotypes (111, 145, 184, 189, 223, 239, 278, 292, 311, 355, 360, 368, 390, 399, 400 and 111A, 145, 184, 189, 223, 239, 278, 292, 355, 390, 399, 400) that are common among the Sierra Leone ethnic groups have not been observed previously (Table 2). Thus, there are significant differences in mtDNA haplotype distribution among most populations.
.....In contrast, the other Sierra Leone ethnic groups in this study have a more mobile history that documents the assimilation of people from other ethnic groups, a process that would promote intragroup diversity and intergroup homogeneity. In Senegal, the Wolof and Mandinka samples haplogroup distributions were significantly different as well (Table 6). In contrast, the Mende were indistinguishable from the Wolof indicating that similar distributions of mtDNA haplogroups can occur between geographically distant ethnic groups while colocalized groups can exhibit different haplotype distributions.
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Genetic distance estimates indicated a close relationship of Gullahs and Jamaicans with Sierra Leoneans, while African Americans living in Charleston and the West Coast were progressively more distantly related to the Sierra Leoneans.
The Language You Cry In
This link details the story of an African American woman who kept alive song from Sierra Leone from her Mende ancestors and went back to Sierra Leone
Other DNA studies which I don't have here show other Blacks near by have forefathers mainly descended from modern Guinea, where Fuuta Jalon is located.
The Mande forefathers of the Temne and Mende from:
FARMA TAMI (ca. 1540) GREAT MANE CONQUEROR
Farma Tami was a great warrior and is regarded by the Temne people as their founder. He is said to have organised the Temne into strong kingdoms and established their importance in the country. According to tradition, Farma Tami came from the east with a great army, conquering and destroying all opposition in his advance, until he reached the estuary of the Rokel River. He established his capital in what is now Koya Chiefdom at the town of Robaga, near modern Freetown. Temne elders say that Farma Tami ruled when there were still no guns or swords only spears, shields, knives and bows and arrows.
Historians tell us that Farma Tami was one of the leaders of the Mane invaders, probably ancestors of the modern Mandinka, who came in the early 1500s with advanced concepts of government, elaborate chiefly rituals, and improved methods of weaving and iron manufacture. The Mane soldiers wore fearsome war shirts covered with feathers and fetishes. They carried spears, bows and arrows, knives strapped to their upper arms, and shields made from tight bundles of reeds. The Temne elders still recall that Farma "taught people the art of war", and they still regard the town of Robaga as a sacred place. Indeed, every paramount chief in Koya must make a pilgrimage to Robaga and the shrine of great Farma Tami.
MANSA KAMA (ca. 1650-1720 GREAT KORANKO WARRIOR — KING
Mansa Kama was a great Koranko warrior who led the first major push of the Koranko people into the heart of present-day Sierra Leone. He was the founder of Kamadugu, formerly a chiefdom and now part of Sengbe Chiefdom in the Koinadugu District, and of Kholifa, which constitutes a chiefdom in today's Tonkolili District. Mansa Kama's dynamism is largely responsible for the Koranko influence found among the Temne of Tonkolili today.
Mansa Kama lived from about the mid-16th to the early 17th century. He is said to have been descended from Sundiata Keita, a ruler of medieval Mali in central West Africa, and was a member of the Kargbo clan (another name for Keita). Mansa in most Mandinka-related languages means ruler; and the name "Kama," leaning "elephant," was given to him because he was a great hunter and killer of many elephants. His real name is believed to have been Yira.
Towards the end of the 16th century, Mansa Kama moved into the extreme northeast of the Sierra Leone interior from Sankaran country in what is now the Republic of Guinea. He travelled with an alfa (Islamic scholar, charm-maker and teacher) of the Sesay clan. He stayed for a while with Mansa Morifing in Morifindugu before moving southwards with Morifing's blessings. He next stopped close to the northern reaches of the Rokel River where he founded the town of Kamadugu, named after him (dugu is a suffix meaning "town," usually added to the name of the founder).
By the end of the 16th century, Mansa Kama had fought his way from Kamadugu to reach the coast. He finally returned northwards to make a new base at Rowala at the centre of what became Kholifa country. There he stayed as a ruler of this new Koranko country until his death. He is said to have returned periodically to Kamadugu where his son, Momori Kalko, founder of Kalkoya, one of the oldest towns in Kamadugu, still ruled. When Mansa Kama died, he was buried at Rowala where he left all his charms and regalia of office.
About the 19th century, the Temne took over Kholifa, and they have retained a strong Koranko strain in their culture at Kholifa to the present day. They have also retained the name of Mansa Kama as the title of their traditional ruler, whom they call Masakma, a fitting tribute to this powerful and adventurous early leader of the Koranko.
According to other sources, it was a woman who first led the Mane armies into Sierra Leone.
Mandé-speakers moved west and south of their homeland as traders and conquerors. In the case of traders, an important incentive was probably access to the supplies of salt obtainable from the coast. This move towards the coastlands led to a number of Mandé pioneers carving out kingdoms for themselves in emulation of the major model of Mali. There seem to have been two major axes for the Mandé expansion. One was along the line of the river Gambia, a most useful artery for trade, which rises within a few miles of the sources of the Faleme, one of the major tributaries of the Senegal, whose head-waters were firmly in Mande occupation. The other, separated from the Gambia by the Fouta Djallon massif which the Fulani were occupying, ran south into modern Sierra Leone close by the Susu settlement. In both areas, political organizations were established under rulers called farimas.
Initially these seem often to have paid tribute to Mali, and even after the decline of the great Mali power in the later fifteenth century, they maintained some idea of its ultimate supremacy
Genetic distance estimates indicated a close relationship of Gullahs and Jamaicans with Sierra Leoneans, while African Americans living in Charleston and the West Coast were progressively more distantly related to the Sierra Leoneans.
The Language You Cry In
This link details the story of an African American woman who kept alive song from Sierra Leone from her Mende ancestors and went back to Sierra Leone
Other DNA studies which I don't have here show other Blacks near by have forefathers mainly descended from modern Guinea, where Fuuta Jalon is located.
The Mande forefathers of the Temne and Mende from:
FARMA TAMI (ca. 1540) GREAT MANE CONQUEROR
Farma Tami was a great warrior and is regarded by the Temne people as their founder. He is said to have organised the Temne into strong kingdoms and established their importance in the country. According to tradition, Farma Tami came from the east with a great army, conquering and destroying all opposition in his advance, until he reached the estuary of the Rokel River. He established his capital in what is now Koya Chiefdom at the town of Robaga, near modern Freetown. Temne elders say that Farma Tami ruled when there were still no guns or swords only spears, shields, knives and bows and arrows.
Historians tell us that Farma Tami was one of the leaders of the Mane invaders, probably ancestors of the modern Mandinka, who came in the early 1500s with advanced concepts of government, elaborate chiefly rituals, and improved methods of weaving and iron manufacture. The Mane soldiers wore fearsome war shirts covered with feathers and fetishes. They carried spears, bows and arrows, knives strapped to their upper arms, and shields made from tight bundles of reeds. The Temne elders still recall that Farma "taught people the art of war", and they still regard the town of Robaga as a sacred place. Indeed, every paramount chief in Koya must make a pilgrimage to Robaga and the shrine of great Farma Tami.
MANSA KAMA (ca. 1650-1720 GREAT KORANKO WARRIOR — KING
Mansa Kama was a great Koranko warrior who led the first major push of the Koranko people into the heart of present-day Sierra Leone. He was the founder of Kamadugu, formerly a chiefdom and now part of Sengbe Chiefdom in the Koinadugu District, and of Kholifa, which constitutes a chiefdom in today's Tonkolili District. Mansa Kama's dynamism is largely responsible for the Koranko influence found among the Temne of Tonkolili today.
Mansa Kama lived from about the mid-16th to the early 17th century. He is said to have been descended from Sundiata Keita, a ruler of medieval Mali in central West Africa, and was a member of the Kargbo clan (another name for Keita). Mansa in most Mandinka-related languages means ruler; and the name "Kama," meaning "elephant," was given to him because he was a great hunter and killer of many elephants. His real name is believed to have been Yira.
Towards the end of the 16th century, Mansa Kama moved into the extreme northeast of the Sierra Leone interior from Sankaran country in what is now the Republic of Guinea. He travelled with an alfa (Islamic scholar, charm-maker and teacher) of the Sesay clan. He stayed for a while with Mansa Morifing in Morifindugu before moving southwards with Morifing's blessings. He next stopped close to the northern reaches of the Rokel River where he founded the town of Kamadugu, named after him (dugu is a suffix meaning "town," usually added to the name of the founder).
By the end of the 16th century, Mansa Kama had fought his way from Kamadugu to reach the coast. He finally returned northwards to make a new base at Rowala at the centre of what became Kholifa country. There he stayed as a ruler of this new Koranko country until his death. He is said to have returned periodically to Kamadugu where his son, Momori Kalko, founder of Kalkoya, one of the oldest towns in Kamadugu, still ruled. When Mansa Kama died, he was buried at Rowala where he left all his charms and regalia of office.
About the 19th century, the Temne took over Kholifa, and they have retained a strong Koranko strain in their culture at Kholifa to the present day. They have also retained the name of Mansa Kama as the title of their traditional ruler, whom they call Masakma, a fitting tribute to this powerful and adventurous early leader of the Koranko.
According to other sources, it was a woman who first led the Mane armies into Sierra Leone.
Here's a little: Mandé-speakers moved west and south of their homeland as traders and conquerors. In the case of traders, an important incentive was probably access to the supplies of salt obtainable from the coast. This move towards the coastlands led to a number of Mandé pioneers carving out kingdoms for themselves in emulation of the major model of Mali. There seem to have been two major axes for the Mandé expansion. One was along the line of the river Gambia, a most useful artery for trade, which rises within a few miles of the sources of the Faleme, one of the major tributaries of the Senegal, whose head-waters were firmly in Mande occupation. The other, separated from the Gambia by the Fouta Djallon massif which the Fulani were occupying, ran south into modern Sierra Leone close by the Susu settlement. In both areas, political organizations were established under rulers called farimas. Initially these seem often to have paid tribute to Mali, and even after the decline of the great Mali power in the later fifteenth century, they maintained some idea of its ultimate supremacy
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I am an American but today, I am something more. I am an African too. I feel my roots here in this continent Colin Powell - After visiting Bunce Island, April 1992
A Gullah family with a direct link to Sierra Leone will make its own historic homecoming in 2005. The Martin Family of Charleston, South Carolina are the 7th generation descendants of a 10-year old girl, named "Priscilla", brought on the slave ship "Hare" from Sierra Leone to Charleston in 1756.
Bunce Island was the largest British slave castle on the Rice Coast of West Africa. Founded around 1670, it exported tens of thousands of African captives to North America and the West Indies until the British Parliament finally closed it down in 1808. During its long and tragic history, Bunce Island was operated by four London-based companies: the Gambia Adventurers; the Royal African Company of England (which had official recognition from the British Crown); and the private firms of Grant, Oswald & Company and John & Alexander Anderson.
During the 1750s Richard Oswald, Bunce Island’s principal owner, forged a strong business and personal relationship with Henry Laurens, one of the richest rice planters and slave dealers in the Colony of South Carolina. Rice planters in coastal South Carolina and Georgia were willing to pay high prices for people brought from the Rice Coast of West Africa where farmers had been growing rice for hundreds of years and were experts at its cultivation.
African rice-growing know-how was essential to the prosperity of the American rice industry. Henry Laurens acted as Bunce Island’s business agent in Charleston, receiving the castle’s human cargoes from Sierra Leone and advertising and selling the African captives at auction. Laurens took a 10% commission on each sale, returning the profits to Oswald in London, often in the form of rice paid by South Carolina planters.
Bunce Island’s history illustrates the complex economic relationship between the West African Rice Coast and Great Britain’s Southern Colonies. Its records show that Henry Laurens sent his own ships directly to Bunce Island to obtain slaves for his newly opened rice plantations in coastal Georgia, paying for them with ship-building supplies made from Carolina pine. The Bunce Island’s records also show that Henry Laurens helped his British business partner, Richard Oswald, open up new plantations near St. Augustine, and that Oswald dispatched a number of his skilled African workers directly from Bunce Island to build his plantations in Florida.
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Fouta Djallon has historically had a high degree of outmigration, usually short-term, and mainly to Senegal and Sierra Leone.
More Background:
The West Atantic languages are related distantly in many ways to Bantu. They can be called proto-Bantu. The natives of the far western coast of Africa were West Atlantic speakers. They tended to live in small decentralized villages and lived rather peacefully. They were matrilineal and heritage was passed down from uncle to nephew. Women were important and these groups were often ruled by queens.
When Sundiata took control of Mali he embraced the religion of the star and crescent. Sundaita story is a well told story.But, his general Tiramaghan or Tiranmaghan is not well known.
Tiramaghan founded another state after Sundiata took over Mali. He was a pagan or animist. This sorcerer went to what is now southern Senegal and in the Casamance region. Casamance comes from the Portuguese Casa de Mansa[Mande King/Emperor].
Tiramghan Traore and his troops made war against the native West Atlantic speakers and later married their women. These Mande took on West Atlantic surnames and began to live like the natives while combining elements of Mande culture. Tiramaghan began the first high priest introducing the new Mande religion which the natives incorporaated into their own.
As time went on more Mande went south into Fuuta Djallon. They did the same as before conquering and intermarrying with native women. The Mande language was carried south. Lastly, the Mande ended up in Sierra Leone.
There were small numbers of Mande Muslims in the territories the pagan Mande entered. They were merchants. The were called Dioula and also Moros or Moors. Since they did not practice the state animist religion, they were outsiders.
The Fula also took the same routes as the Mande into these very same places. They pitched their huts along the side of the Mande. They were pagans and followed the same religion as the Mande and th natives. The Fula intermarried with the Mande and natives.
When Mali was pushed back by the Tuareg and Songhay, more and more Muslims went west into the areas of pagan Mande, Fula and natives. The new Mande kept their Mande names and did not practice the old religions.
The Tuareg/Songhay domination of Mali force out the Peul from Northern Nigeria. The Massina Peul went west into Fuuta Jalon became the majority of the Muslim Peul.
Some others came down from Fuuta Toro in Senegal. Hence, the new state of Fuuta Djallon was born.
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Br'er Rabbit is the hero of the Uncle Remus stories derived from African-American folktales of the US South.
Br'er Rabbit in Disney's adaptation of Song of the South. The word "Br'er" in his name (and in those of other characters in the stories) presumably reflects a Baptist practice of including the title "Brother" in addressing male members of one's church congregation. The stories, however, can be traced back to trickster figures, particularly the hare, that figured prominently in the storytelling traditions of West Africa. These tales continue to be part of the traditional folklore of such people in Africa as the Wolof of Senegal. The rabbit in Africa was called Zomo. In his American incarnation, Br'er Rabbit represents the Black slave who uses his wits to overcome circumstances and even to enact playful revenge on his adversaries, representing the White slave-owners. Though not always successful, his subversive efforts made him both a folk hero and friendly comic figure.
Some students of animation have traced the origin of the Bugs Bunny character to the tales of African legend which had a couple of characters known as "Zomo" and "Bro Rabbit", which may in turn have evolved into the 1930s Uncle Remus' stories of a bunny who outwitted farmers, known as "Br'er Rabbit";
First off I have to say that when reading the Brer Rabbit story (Unclue Remus Initiates the Little Boy) all I could think of was Looney Toons. Even though the langauge was hard to read, the langauge paints a clear picture for the reader.
All I could picture was a rabbit like Bugs Bunny and a cartoon fox pulling stunts like in the Looney Toons cartoons.....
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The Wolof came from the north east, and developed a caste system like other Sahelians. The slave caste often became soldiers of the Emperor and tool the name thiedo or tiedo. Phyllis Wheatly, the first African American novelist, was capturesd by theido warriors in Senegambia and sold into slavery.
What it does not say is that Waalo's kings got their power from matrilineal descent. Three lineages from the first wife(queen), The power of the royal lineages were often disputed. They were Logar of Maure origin, Dyo of Serer/Tukulor origin, and Tedyek of Peul-Mande origin.
Rice and Slaves: Ethnicity and the Slave Trade in Colonial South Carolina (Blacks in the New World)
by Daniel C. Littlefield
In this thorough and readable study, Daniel C. Littlefield examines the African heritage of rice cultivation in colonial South Carolina.
Littlefield discusses the choices rice planters made in securing workers from certain African regions; he also discusses the knowledge these Africans brought to the plantation economy. Littlefield argues that expertise in rice cultivation mostly came to South Carolina from Africa.
Rice was grown by the Malagasy, the people of Madagascar, and by many peoples of Upper Guinea (a region encompassing the modern nations of Senegal, Gambia, Guinea-Bissau, Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia). South Carolina planters, in fact, paid the highest prices for workers from Senegambia (the environs of the Senegal and Gambia rivers), a major center of rice cultivation in Africa.....
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As late as the 1940s, a Black American linguist found Gullahs in rural South Carolina and Georgia who could recite songs and fragments of stories in Mende and Vai, and who could do simple counting in the Guinea/Sierra Leone dialect of Fula. In fact, all of the African texts that Gullah people have preserved are in languages spoken within Sierra Leone and along its borders.
'It is also a syllabary and looks "similar" to the Vai syllabary but unlike the Vai which reads from left to right, the Mende reads from right to left due to it's having been influenced by ancient pictographs and the secret scripts used to transcribe Arabic in the Hodh region of Mauritania. It was devised around 1920 by Kisimi Kamala and is purely phonetic and has 195 characters. The Mende people belong to the Mande group of languages which includes Bambara.'
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Many people today are unaware of the genius of the African. Although they might admit to a complex verbal language structure, it may come as quite a surprise to many that African people have a multitude of written languages. In Liberia the Bassa people have a written script. The Kpelle, Gola, Lorma, Grebo, Vai and Kissi also are known to have their own written language. Most of these scripts have diminished over time, as a result of abandonment.
Had Hanibal visited Liberia in 500 B.C., particularly Kpowin(Tradetown) and Bassa Cove, he would have witnessed the Bassa script in use. The script is called Vah by the Bassas, which is translated to the phrase: To throw sign. Not to be confused with the Vai ethnic group, who also have their own written script as mentioned above. Vah was initially the throwing of sign or signals utilizing the natural environment. Teeth marks would be left on leaves and placed in a discrete location for the intended reader. Messages where also carved in the barks of trees. Eventually this evolved into a complex written language. During the era of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, many Bassas avoided slave traders by utilizing Vah(Bassa Script). During the colonial, and on through to the neo-colonial period in Africa, a decline in the usage of Vah script caused by external cultural forces, almost brought this written portion of the Bassa language to extinction.
Dr. Flo Darvin Lewis in the 1900s would re-discover the script in South America. Bassas that were sold into slavery now living in Brazil and the West Indies; kept the tradition of writing alive, passing it from generation to generation. Through his travels, Dr. Lewis was astonished to find out that he, being a Bassa himself, knew nothing of any such writing amongst his people back in Liberia. This discovery put Dr. Lewis on a determined path to learn, teach and revive the script in Liberia. Lewis attended Syracuse University and earned a doctorate in Chemistry, where he was known as the African Prince. Dr. Lewis returned to Liberia by way of Dresden, Germany where a company manufactured the first printing press for the Bassa alphabet. In Liberia, he established an institution for learning Vah. Among his students were, former Senator Edwin A. Morgan, Counselors Zacharia Roberts and Jacob Logan. Fear, mis-trust, sabotage and colonial thinking Liberians would lead to Dr. Lewis’ untimely death; leaving an open legacy yet to be completed.
The reviving of the Bassa Vah script continues to day with the efforts of the Bassa Vah Association, striving to expand the use of this African writing for the printing of newspapers, literature, science and religious text.
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If you are based in the states most of you have probably heard about the Grey's Anatomy star... Isiah Washington. He was recently in Sierra Leone filming a documentary which will be aired on ABC at some point soon. It turns out Isiah had a DNA test last year which revealed a maternal lineage to the Mendé people of Sierra Leone.
This follows the recent Priscilla's homecoming celebration when Mrs. Thomalind Martin Polite, an African American woman from Charleston, South Carolina, made an extraordinary and historic journey back to Sierra Leone. Thomalind is known to be a direct descendant of a 10 year old girl who was kidnapped from Africa in 1756, placed aboard the slave ship Hare in Sierra Leone bound for Charleston, South Carolina. Oprah Winfrey also had her DNA tested. This genetic test determined that her maternal line originated among the Kpelle ethnic group, in the area that today is Liberia (apparently she earlier thought - or hoped she was Zulu).
Anyway, what does this mean for Sierra Leone and other African countries? It means great opportunties for greater cooperation between Africans their brothers and sisters scattered around the globe. This is one to follow with great interest as we will hear more stories such as those mentioned above in the coming years and will probably play a huge part in Africa's tourism industry in years to come.
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The Krio Fula inhabit the western peninsula of Sierra Leone near Freetown, the country's capital. The area in which they live consists of heavily wooded mountains rising from coastal swamps. Annual rains can reach 200 inches, and the humidity is usually very high.
The Krio Fula are of mixed ancestry. They are partially descended from freed African slaves who settled on the coast of Sierra Leone during the first half of the nineteenth century. These freed slaves intermarried with many groups already in the area, such as the Kru, the Mende, the Vai, the Mandinke, the Kissi, and the Europeans. The resulting mixture of cultures and languages eventually produced the Creole race. (Hence the term "Krio" in their name.)
The Fulani (Fula) people settled in the Fouta Djallon region of Sierra Leone nearly three hundred years ago, and mixed with the people of the area. (Hence the term "Fula" in their name.)
What are their lives like? The Krio Fula are a relatively small people group, numbering less than 50,000. Their language, also called Krio Fula, belongs to the Niger-Congo language family. They are not of pure African origin, but rather, like other Fulani, are of Semitic descent. They are tall with lighter skin, straighter hair, and straighter noses than other African tribes of Sierra Leone.
The Krio Fula are primarily skilled cattle farmers, with their lives depending upon and revolving around the cattle herds. The status of a family can be determined by the size and health of its cattle. The more a man knows about cattle herding, the greater respect he is given by the community.
Herding cattle is usually a male activity; however, the women milk and take care of the cattle. They also tend to the small livestock and poultry, cultivate gardens, and carry containers of milk and cheese to the local markets for sell or trade.
Most Krio Fula also engage in some type of farming. Rice is cultivated in the swamps on the peninsular coast, while millet, peanuts, and other vegetables are grown farther inland.
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ATLANTA - The technology has been there for years, but former United Nations Ambassador Andrew Young didn't want to know about his ancestry at first.
But he finally yielded to a request by a company called African Ancestry, which matches DNA samples from clients with a database of more than 22,000 African lineages.
A simple swab of the cheeks and some time - four to six weeks - linked Young's mother's line to the Mende tribe in Sierra Leone. The tribe also has roots in Sudan. The link indicates he is a distant cousin of the leader of the Amistad slave rebellion in the 1850s.
"I guess I never realy wanted to know where in Africa I was from because I would decide where I was from by where I happened to be," Young said. "I wanted to be from all of Africa, not just a particular place in Africa."
Hundreds of other blacks, troubled by dead-ends and yellowed records in old government offices, churches and cemeteries, have used DNA tests to reveal their ancestry to other African tribes and countries.
About 2,000 blacks - including 80 in Georgia and 300 throughout the South - have used the company's $349 DNA test, since it was first offered in February 2003. Some of the best known include filmmaker Spike Lee and Lavar Burton of the television miniseries "Roots."
Young, a longtime civil rights activist and former Atlanta mayor, has been going to Africa for 30 years, helping countless countries with his political and practical wisdom.
Prior to his DNA test, Young said he felt close to the African countries of Angola, South Africa and Tanzania because those were places he actively worked to help promote economic development.
But his new link to war-torn Sierra Leone and Sudan has helped provide a focus for the civil rights leader.
"This gives me more reason to be interested in involved in what's going on," he said.
The program has its skeptics. Stanford University law professor Henry "Hank" Greely warns that the tests only identify two of possibly hundreds of ancestors and can only give a person a rough idea of one's ethnicity.
But "knowing just a little bit is a lot better than knowing nothing," said company spokesman Michael Darden, who said the test pointed his ancestry to Nigeria.
The company's goal is to help blacks reconnect with their homeland on the African continent.
"It's particularly important for us because our history was lost when we were taken from the continent of Africa," said Gina Paige, the company's president, who is black and has used the test to find DNA family links with people from Nigeria, Liberia, Angola and Portugal. "Knowing where you are from is a very central component to knowing who you are."
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posted
Interesting observations but the Prayway reference seems out of place--if only because of its pollution with outmoded and erroneous racial concepts.
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posted
Great putting together of an historical record! Some questions: 1. My hypothesis, based on your exposition, is that Mississippi and Alabama would show majority roots in a different araea from the Senegambia region. My premise, if you agree, is that the Senegambia region of today is not the Senegambia region of the 1600's. 2. Do you thnk that Fifty cents (fiddy?) would have the same roots as those you mentioned, i.e. Mende, Wolof? See where I am going with this?
The character of the African descent people in thw Carolinas (for me) is different. They are more gracious, upright in postures, show some nobility??? when I compared through personal observation from the people on the Golf coast of Mississippi and Alabama. Their facial structure is "different' (inexact observation).
It is obvious that the sample size and location (Carolinas) will reflect the Mende/Wolof raison d'etre and reflect that area only and NOT the vast areas of other African historical placement!
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The Mississipi Coast region's Blacks have the same ethnic background as the South easterners. I don't like talking about this group or that group in a negative way. What goes around comes around.
You have a fascination for 50 Cent. many of the NYC rappers have a West indian background. I am pretty sure Doug E. Fresh, Biggie Smalls, and RKS-One are West Indian. I think 50 Cent maybe as well. Either way, they too are of West African descent.
King Scorpion,
read closely from above: The Mende script (Sierra Leone).
'It is also a syllabary and looks "similar" to the Vai syllabary but unlike the Vai which reads from left to right, the Mende reads from right to left due to it's having been influenced by ancient pictographs and the secret scripts used to transcribe Arabic in the Hodh region of Mauritania.
I think the scripts were standardized in the 20th century. But, the roots of the scripts are older.
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Yazid, this is the anchorwoman Robert Roberts. She's from the Gulf coast region. She looks like many South Easterners I know and could easily fit in my family and the families around me who have the same southern background I have.
In other words, African American is African American from whatever background one come from.
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posted
This is a bit of the historical record. But before I continue, let's get one thing straight. The African American community has one national religion and that is Christianity. Everything we ever did in these hundreds of years in the USA was backed up by the Christian church.
The Abolition of slavery itself was part a Christian Revival. The African who sold the ancestors of the African Americans into slavery were a combination of Muslims and practioners of traditional religions.
I hsave no obligations to either of these traditions. They did not free us. They enslaved us. The African Americans like the Ancient Hebrew were freed by the same God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.
So, I can say Praise The Lord! Thank You Jesus! Amen! and Hellelujah! God is Good All The Time! Can't Nobody Do Me Like Jesus!
The Holy Spirit active amongst the African Americans has guided us well. We are like Joseph who was sold into slavery by his brothers.
My country is the USA and my tribe is African American.
I feel like a child that was adopted at birth who always wanted to find out who his original parents were, even though he always had what he needed and more. The child finds his real parents and finds out that he had a better deal with the adoptive parents because the real parents had issues and were extremely problematic. Africa is problematic.
Thank God for America. Thank God for Jesus. God Bless America always.
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The collection of documents brought together in this project begins to tell the story of the growth of Protestant religion among African Americans during the nineteenth century, and of the birth of what came to be known as the "Black Church" in the United States. This development continues to have enormous political, spiritual, and economic consequences. But perhaps what is most apparent in these texts is the diversity of ways in which that religious tradition was envisioned, experienced, and implemented. From the white Baptist and Methodist missionaries sent to convert enslaved Africans, to the earliest pioneers of the independent black denominations, to black missionaries in Africa, to the eloquent rhetoric of W.E.B. DuBois, the story of the black church is a tale of variety and struggle in the midst of constant racism and oppression. It is also a story of constant change, and of the coincidence of cultural cohesion among enslaved Africans and the introduction of Protestant evangelicalism to their communities.
The Church During Slavery For our purposes, the account begins in the decades after the American Revolution, as Northern states gradually began to abolish slavery. As a result, sharper differences emerged between the experiences of enslaved peoples in the South and those Northerners who were now relatively free. By 1810 the slave trade to the United States had come to an end and the slave population began to increase naturally, giving rise to an increasingly large native-born population of African Americans. With fewer migrants who had experienced Africa personally, these transformations allowed the myriad cultures and language groups of enslaved Africans to blend together, making way for the preservation and transmission of religious practices that were increasingly "African-American."
This transition coincided with the period of intense religious revivalism known as "awakenings." In the Southern states beginning in the 1770s, increasing numbers of slaves converted to evangelical religions such as the Methodist and Baptist faiths. Many clergy within these denominations actively promoted the idea that all Christians were equal in the sight of God, a message that provided hope and sustenance to the slaves. They also encouraged worship in ways that many Africans found to be similar, or at least adaptable, to African worship patterns, with enthusiastic singing, clapping, dancing, and even spirit-possession. Still, many white owners and clergy preached a message of strict obedience, and insisted on slave attendance at white-controlled churches, since they were fearful that if slaves were allowed to worship independently they would ultimately plot rebellion against their owners. It is clear that many blacks saw these white churches, in which ministers promoted obedience to one's master as the highest religious ideal, as a mockery of the "true" Christian message of equality and liberation as they knew it.
In the slave quarters, however, African Americans organized their own "invisible institution." Through signals, passwords, and messages not discernible to whites, they called believers to "hush harbors" where they freely mixed African rhythms, singing, and beliefs with evangelical Christianity. We have little remaining written record of these religious gatherings. But it was here that the spirituals, with their double meanings of religious salvation and freedom from slavery, developed and flourished; and here, too, that black preachers, those who believed that God had called them to speak his Word, polished their "chanted sermons," or rhythmic, intoned style of extemporaneous preaching. Part church, part psychological refuge, and part organizing point for occasional acts of outright rebellion (Nat Turner, whose armed insurrection in Virginia in 1831 resulted in the deaths of scores of white men, women, and children, was a self-styled Baptist preacher), these meetings provided one of the few ways for enslaved African Americans to express and enact their hopes for a better future.
Emancipation Emancipation from slavery in 1863 posed distinctive religious challenges for African Americans in the South. When the Civil War finally brought freedom to previously enslaved peoples, the task of organizing religious communities was only one element of the larger need to create new lives--to reunite families, to find jobs, and to figure out what it would mean to live in the United States as citizens rather than property. Northern blacks, having already gained freedom, wanted to bring their nascent black churches to their freed Southern brethren. Yet they saw Emancipation as an enormous logistical challenge: how could black Protestants meet the many needs of newly freed slaves and truly welcome them into a Christian community? For both Southern and Northern blacks, Emancipation promised a meeting between two African-American religious traditions that had moved far apart, in terms of both theology and ritual, in the previous seventy years. In significant respects, the story of African-American religion between Emancipation and the Northern migration that began just prior to World War I is a tale of regionally distinctive communities that found several areas of common cause, not the least of which were the advent of Jim Crow and lynching as ominous new forms of racism.
A long history of antislavery and political activity among Northern black Protestants had convinced them that they could play a major role in the adjustment of the four million freed slaves to American life. In a massive missionary effort, Northern black leaders such as Daniel A. Payne and Theophilus Gould Steward established missions to their Southern counterparts, resulting in the dynamic growth of independent black churches in the Southern states between 1865 and 1900. Predominantly white denominations, such as the Presbyterian, Congregational, and Episcopal churches, also sponsored missions, opened schools for freed slaves, and aided the general welfare of Southern blacks, but the majority of African-Americans chose to join the independent black denominations founded in the Northern states during the antebellum era. Within a decade the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) and the African Methodist Episcopal Zion (AMEZ) churches claimed Southern membership in the hundreds of thousands, far outstripping that of any other organizations. They were quickly joined in 1870 by a new Southern-based denomination, the Colored (now "Christian") Methodist Episcopal Church, founded by indigenous Southern black leaders. Finally, in 1894 black Baptists formed the National Baptist Convention, an organization that is currently the largest black religious organization in the United States.
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Cemeterues are a rich example of cultural and ethnic diversity. Burial practices tend to be vivid manifestations of cultural homeostasis. Since such customs are slow to change, one can witness today, in the remnants of the grave, factors of an ethnic group's ancient material culture. Remnants of an African belief in an afterlife can be deciphered through late 19th century and early 20th century African-American cemeteries. African customs and religions, introduced to the Americas through the transatlantic slave trade, underwent a cultural synthesis, emerging in a contemporary African-American manifestation of a Christianized "cult" of the dead. This rich and diverse trend is readily apparent in the cemeteries of the north Florida panhandle.
Of specific interest here is the religion and history of the Bakongo people. Traditional kongo geography includes parts of the contemporary countries of Bas-Zaire, Cabinda, Congo-Brazzaville, Gabon, and northern Angola. Many groups in this region share key cultural and religious concepts with the Bakongo and also suffered, with them, the ordeals of the transatlantic slave trade. Large numbers of Bakongo people entered Georgia and north Florida in the 19th century.
Anthropologist have long acknowledged the impact of the Kongo people on the African-American populaton of the southeast United States especially in the influence on Black English, visual traditions and burial customs. These funerary practices can be witnessed in the bordering of individual graves, the scraping of graves so that the soil above the deceased remains grassless; the application of cookware, glass and other domestic objects, particuliarly white ones. to the grave; placement of trees and vegetation. I propose that this influence can be further identified in the cemeteries of Black Americans in north Florida through "T" shaped headstones particular to Black cemeteries in the 1920's through the 1950's. I suggest that, while thoroughly regarded today as decorative and Christian motifs, these elements were directly inspired by the Kongo cosmogram of the Four Moments of the Sun, an extraodinary powerful and prevalent symbol in Bakongo cosmological theory and mortuary ritual.
All of these customs, just briefly mentioned, have a particular purpose and reflect directly their African predecessors. If the deceased is displeased with the interment, or is disturbed, the spirit can return to the land of the living with the capacity to do good or evil. Thus the spirit must be pacified and directed into the world of the dead. African-American burial traditions reflect the acknowledgment that the ancestral spirit is present at the grave. This illusive presence has been coined the "Flash of the Spirit" by scholar Robert Farris Thompson, who along with John Michael Vlach, is thoroughly published on these subjects.
The importance placed on delineating the boundary or border of a grave may be explained by Bakongo ritual beliefs surrounding sacred herbal medicines. Ngangas (Healers) employed ritual charms, divination, powerful spirits or herbal recipes to affect the world. One of the most powerful herbal ingredients used by the Banganga mbuki (Herbal Healers), was grave dirt konw as goofer or goofer-dust. The practices of the Nganga and their ingredients including goofer, were transferred to African American culture. The mortuary practices of the Bakongo people, even today, specifically suggest a general and unconcious idea of a sacred space as bounded and oriented. Hence the Bakong today, like African-Americans, face their deceased toward the east. They are literally oriented and bounded by the grave borders.
The emphasis given to borders and grave soil is evidenced in the consistent use of cement slabs, fencin and vegetation. The Kongo and early African-Americans graves were often created as scrape graves; grass was not allowed to cover the area of earthy directly above the body. This practice created a delineation around the grave. Today the cement slab is a unique and consistent part of African-American cemeteries harkening back to the tradition of the grassless, scraped grave. Anthropologist have witnessed contemporary rituals in lower Kongo where children are required to go into a cemetery before the burial and clear the area of grass. Ms. Chester Hayes of Tallahassee Florida, remembers as a child having to clear grass from his grandmother's grave and keep the dirt mounded until his family could afford to have a cement slab placed there.
Much like votive offerings, various household good were left for the deceased person's spirit at the grave. Thompson suggest that the grave, with its goofer-dust, and grave goods are a "charm for the persistence of the spirit." African-American funerary traditions are constant reminders of Thompson's concept of "The Flash of the Spirit." He explains that while the grave is the container, the spirit itself is a spark. The grave goods left on top of the burial were actually believed to contain a bit of the spark as is expressed in the point of view of a Bakongo woman: Plates and cups and drinking glasses are frequently selected for placement on the surface of a tomb. It is believed that the last strength of a dead person is still present within that sort of object.... My own mother died while I was away. When I return to my village, and visit her grave, I shall touch her plate and cup. After I touch them, later I will dream... according to the way my mother wanted. By touching these objects automatically I comprehend the Mambu (affairs, matters) my mother was wiling to transmit to me.
The perception of the grave as a contact point with the spark of the spirit world is thus heightened.
Leaving the last objects the dead ever touched in life was believed to complete the spirit in Africa and to pacify the spirit in Africa-America. A Black couple interviewed in Georgia noted "I don't guess you be bothered much by the spirits if you give 'em a good funeral and put the things what belong to 'em on top of the grave... You must puts all the things what they use like the dishes and the medicine bottle. The spirits need these same things as the man. The spirit rest and don't wander about."
Containers of varying types are the most popular grave good placed on African-American plots. Usually these containers are purposefully broken so that they retain their shape but are no longer useable. A woman in Georgia suggested that this was done in order to break the chain of death. If the offerings are not broken then other family members will quickly follow the deceased into the spirit world. In north Florida today one can find a variety of cook ware, ceramic cups, mason jars, enameled-metal bowls, glasses, depression glass, and milk glass wares scattered about African-American cemeteries.
The prevalence of glass ware, especially of white ware, is again indicative of the "Flash of the Spirit." Thompson explains that the realm of the spirits is believed by some Kongo to be "the white realm." In order to release or honor spirit powers a white chicken is often sacrificed on the grave. Small white or glass chickens are placed on Kongo inspired graves in both Africa and the Americas. The closest visual similarity I have found to this practice is the prevalence of statues of white swans of planters; of course, one must also take into consideration the commercial designs available. There may be no connection other than the coincidence of design in floral equiptment. Nevertheless, the gleaming whiteness of milk glass, the sparkle of broken edges of clear glass in the sun, the bleached presence of bright white shells, white washed markers, and very popular white landscaping gravel marking the scraped grave certainly remind the visitor of the spark of ever-present spirit. African-American cemeteries are also often marked by the use of foil that catches the sun creating the sharp glimmer of shining white light. Some communities in Kongo and Haiti have replaced the use of white shells with white tile that is highly reflective of light, also associated with water. In order to analyze the persistent placement of sea shells and the use of bathroom tile, both associated with water, the Bakongo perception of the world must be considered.
Bakongo cosmological philosophy goes far in explaining their spiritual beliefs as they relate to these local cemeteries. The N'Kongo (i.e. an inhabitant of the capital of Kongo) thought of the earth as a mountain over a body of water which is the land of the dead, called Mpemba. In Mpemba the sun rises and sets just as it does in the land of the living...the water is both a passage and a great barrier. The world, in Kongo thought, is like two mountains opposed at their bases and seperated by the ocean. At the rising and setting of the sun the living and the dead exchange day and night. The setting of the sun signifies man's death and its rising, his rebirth, or the continuity of his life. Bakongo believe and hold it true thta man's life has no end, that it constitutes a cycle, and death is merely a transition in the process of change
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The Nkisi is the object which is ritually worshipped. It is the central to all ceremonies in Palo (Mayombe). Every Nkisi encapsulates an Mpungo. Mpungo is a Kongo Deity, much like a catholic saint, Nkita. The pantheon of mpungo, kimpungulu are classified as deityies that serve a purpose and are associated with an aspect of nature (thunder, land, wind etc.) Because of the development of Palo practices in Cuba and because of its antiquity it is difficult if not impossibel to find the exact names of these deities in Afrika although one can find mpungo of similar purpose and characteristics. While mpungos are numbered in the hundreds there are still many others that few know about because little or no published informatoin on rare nkisi from Cuba. Cuban kimpungulu are often associated with Yoruba Orisa.
Beliefs surrounding Palo Mayombe extend beyond the worship of Mpungo. Palo is a henotheistic religion that believes in a Supreme Being called Nsambi.
Nsambi, Sambia, Nsambiampungo, Pungun Sambia, Sambia Liri, Sambia Surukuru, Sambia Bilongo; the high God, made the heavens, the stars, the sun, the moon and the Earth. He/She created nature and their forces. After a time of watching storms, blizzards, and heat, Sambia decided to create animals. Then created man and woman. After creating man and woman, Sambia to them how to survive in the world. Sambia also taught man and woman how to work with the forces of nature and their spirits and taught us them of the Nkisi, the Makutos, Ngangas and how to build them.
Although very transcendent and removed from the activities of human beings in comparison with the Nkisi, he is still venerated with prayers, songs, and chants before attempting to venerate any ministers or Nkisi.
Lukankanse/Lucambe/Kadiampembe
Considered by many to be equivalent to the Christian devil. Some say he is an aspect of Nsambe and does not oppose "him/her" or its work in the Judeo Christian sense of the word. These forces of nature are considered playful, trick and dangerous for those who cannot handle their energy. Many Paleros (Priests) describe anything that is associated with Lucambe as ndoki. In essence this is truly a misuse of the word ndoki. Ndoki is anything that has "power." A palero can be an Nganga Nsambi and be more ndoki than another.
In contemporary Kongo society anyone that is extremely good at something may be referred to as Ndoki. A doctor or dancer may be ndoki. It is for this reason that there exist ndoki bueno and ndoki malo-good ndoki and bad ndoki. The main thing about ndokis that are built is that "nsalan con el viento" - they work with the wind. Names like whirlwind/tornado are also prevalent. Ndoki malo does not work with the Christian imagery, it does not like anything that strictly refers to any signs of benevolence or mercy. It is for this reason that you will find some prendas (consecrated cauldrons filled with earth, sticks, bones, herbs and various sacred objects) that contain no crucifix. Unlike Nsambi, Lugambe can be directly "worked" with since he has his own fetish. This prenda is reserved for very experienced Tatas (Priest). Lugambe has been described by one Tata who possesses him as, "an entity of extreme light but he is hard to control."
Mpungo
Lucero/Nkuyo/Manunga/Lubaniba
He is a warrior. He is one that brings true balance. Guides all things through paths to accomplish the work that needs to be done and he is the stabilizer of our lives and our healh. Some people compare him to the Yoruba Esu.
There are ramas (Branches) that prepare Lucero in a cement bust with cowries for eyes, ears, nose and mouth, similar to Esu. However there are several munansos of Palo that prepare him in a clay or iron cauldron. A palo elder, Tata Manuel Kongo, explains below that there are several different types of luceros. These include:
Lucero Malongo-Serve to guide the individuals that have received it.
Luceros de Guia- They are the luceros that guide and Nkisi. In some lines every Nkisi has a lucero guide.
Luceros Ndoki/Kini Kini- Similar to the chicheriku of the Yoruba. These can live outside or inside an Nkisi. They are there to help the Nkisi and can be sent out to do malicious acts. They are made using wooden dolls.
Fundamentos de Luceros- These are completely built Luceros Mundos.
Luceros Guardieros- They functions as guardians, also known as "Guardieros Talanquera, Oficio Puerta."
The name Lucero derives from the Spanish word "star." This is because the Kongos believed that the stars represented the spirits of the "Nkuyo", especially shooting stars.
Zarabanda
Zarabanda is the energy of working and strength. Zarabanda is a very populare and prominent prenda. Zaraband is the epitome of raw energy being focused into solidity.
With is machete (Mbele), Zarabanda keeps man and spirits in line with threat of falling under the very weapons that he provided. He is the ultimate in Kongo warfare. He is the "tronco mayor," eldest, in the Brillumba rites. His role in Palo is indispendable, there are those that believe that a palero is not complete until he has received Zarabanda because Zarabanda is the owner of the Knife, the mbele, mbele kasuso and mbele mbobo which allow the tata to "work" by using the knife to sacrifice animals and initiate others.
Siete Rayos/Mukiamamuilo/Nsasi/Sabranu Nsansi
Seven lightning bolts in English, or Nsasi in Bantu. Nsasi is a multifaceted prenda. Hes the Tronco Mayor of Mayomber branches. In "pure" Mayombe he is the only mpungo that is "worked" with.
He is the action of burning in all forms, from the candle to the lightning bolt. He is the Kongo god of Thunder. The royal palm found in the tropics and subtropics are sacred to him because they draw his energy to the Earth by enticing lightning to strike them.
Siete Rayos is propitiated with stones from the forest. at the foot of a Royal palm tree, or anywhere that lightning has been known to strike.
Watariamba, Vence Batalla, or Saca Empeno is the god of the hunt and war, he is usually accompanied by the tools of Zarabanda, with whom he has a pact. Due to the rarity of the contents of this Nkisi what is usually done is, Zarabanda is given with a "pact of Watariamba" allowing the Palero to have both mpungos in one Nkisi. He is swift justice.
GuruNfinda/Sinduala Ndundu Yambaka Butan Seke
GuruNfinda is the Nkisis of what the forest has to provide. He is the god of herbal medicine. Without GuruNfinda, no potion, remedy, medicine, or magic could exist. He is the proverbial owner of Palo. GuruNfinda is hung in a pouch called a makuto, or resguardo de seke in many homes. In rare form will you this mpungo inside a cauldron. He can also be put in a clay dish. GuruNfinda "completes" the Tata and given him "license" to work with the sticks and plants necessary. When and individual buys sticks to work with, he/she must have a pact with GuruNfinda done to sanctify the sticks. He is strikingly ls similar to the Yoruba Osain.
All plants and sticks that grow in the forest are alive and inhabited with a strength that is derived from the earth, the sky, water that falls on it for it to grow GuruNfinda is the deified presentation of such pacts.
Madre de Agua/Kalunga/Mama Kalunga/Pungo Kasimba/Mama Umba/Mbumba Mamba/Nkita Kiamasa/Nkita Kuna Mamba/Baluande
Rules over Yimbi or Simbi Nkita-spirits of the water that are consecrated and put into Nkisi Masa.
Water spirits are also called Nkisi Mamba as is the sacred mix of plants with water thta is often consecrated and used for a variety of purposes. Spirits from the woods - Nkisi Misenga, Nkita Minseke, Minseke.
Mother of the water, or Kalunga and baluande in Bakongo, is the energy of protective motherhood. A Palero will call upon her to release the force of an enraged mother to visit her wrath on the childs abuser. She is the force that heals as a midwife, or harms as would an abusive parent. Wate is her attribute. Water which gives all life, and takes it at will. Its force is the life giving amniotic fluid or drowning flood. All water is her domain.
Unlike Yoruba/Lukumi her power extends beyond that of motherhood and fishes to the land of the dead. Because water is seen as the dividing line between the living and the dead, she is one of the most feared Nkisi.
End of Part 1.
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"The Old Plantation," South Carolina, about 1790. This famous painting shows Gullah slaves dancing and playing musical instruments derived from Africa. Sierra Leoneans can easily recognize that they are playing the shegureh, a women's instrument (rattle) characteristic of the Mende and neighboring tribes.
Mende Dancer
In skillful hands, the women’s instrument, the gourd rattle, shegureh, covered in beaded netting, can call out names and signal to dancers, for example, to pick up their feet or to slow down and relax their pace to the subtle rhythmic changes.
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"The Old Plantation," South Carolina, about 1790. This famous painting shows Gullah slaves dancing and playing musical instruments derived from Africa. Sierra Leoneans can easily recognize that they are playing the shegureh, a women's instrument (rattle) characteristic of the Mende and neighboring tribes.
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The 2,000,000 Mende comprise numerous kinds of social structure, such as firmly marked kin groups, political hierarchies and societies for diverse purposes: training boys and girls in appropriate behavior, protection against enemies or curing illnesses. The Mende are farmers who grow rice, yams, peanuts, and cocoa and who collect palm oil. They practice crop rotation to avoid exhausting the soil. Most bodily ills are believed to result from transgressions against the rules of conduct laid down by one sodality to another. The Mende are best known for smooth, black, helmet-shaped masks, named sowei, used by the sande society, in particular, during the initiating girls. The initiates learn wisdom, beauty, grace, and self-control, all of which they will need within the multigenerational, polygamous households of their future husbands.
All Mende girls join the sande society at puberty. Representing female water spirits, the masks have an idealized female face whose aesthetic reflects religious and philosophical ideals. The design of the facial features conforms to strict conventions and has symbolic content. These masks are characterized by the shiny skin, the rings at the neck and the elaborate hair styling that suggest good health and a well-to-do social condition. The characteristic rings at the base of the masks can be explained as the concentric ripples created as the spirit emerges from the water. On the other hand, they are also believed to represent folds of fat, considered a sign of beauty, fertility, vitality, and health.
The coiffures, on the other hand, display a great range of variations, which reflect changing fashions and thus may facilitate the dating and localization of the masks. These helmets were carved from the full trunk of a large tree. Sowei appears in public during the time when young girls are initiated into adulthood. It may also emerge at the crowning of or during the funeral ceremonies of a paramount chief. The masks are carved by men, but danced by women. This is unusual in Africa, since men usually wear masks that conceal the face. They were worn over the head with the rim resting on the shoulders. There are helmets with one, two, or four faces. Because the mask is "found" beside a stream deep in the forest, where the sande spirit is said to live, and is supposed not to be an artifact at all, the carver in this case is anonymous. The dancer takes care that her costume contain no opening other than a narrow slit for the eyes, not to come into contact with the spirit, which she imagines as possessing a fearful, all-consuming power.
Members of the corresponding male society, poro, also wear masks, although they are of differing form. The women's yasse, a divination and healing society, employs slender human figures called minsere. Large ugly gongoli masks are used entirely for entertainment. Fecundity fetishes are also known.
For generations, farmers in Sierra Leone and adjoining portions of Guinea and Liberia have unearthed small figures carved of soapstone and other types of rock. The imagery and the style of these sculptures are quite varied, especially among those found in the lands now inhabited by the Kissi and Kono people. In lands now owned by the Mende people, farmers place excavated stone figures or freestanding heads in their rice fields or palm groves.
Regarded as the representatives of previous owners of the land, the objects are given offerings and asked to bring abundant harvests. The Mende call these stone images nomoli (plural: nomolosia) -- “found spirit.”
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My family, and I have taken DNA tests to trace our family, and the results are quite interesting. My straight line female DNA test went through Europe, and into North Africa. My brothers male line DNA test found us in Columbia South America.
My first cousin on my fathers stated that he took a DNA test, and they found connections in Nigeria. The test he took revealed that our maternal Grandmothers family came from Nigeria. The tribes we connected to are the Fulani & Kanuri. My Grandmother Annie Bonaparte, came to Pennsylvania from South Carolina. They were slaves in South Carolina, and until now we had little information on their background.
This is actually the second tribe my family has connected to. On my mothers side, my Great-Great Grandmother, Leah Ruth, was sold into slavery from Guinea West Africa. Her tribe were the Malinke, who were also part of the Mali Empire. She, and her family were Muslims, and she was also a slave in South Carolina.
If would like to know more about the Fulani.
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I took a maternal DNA test about a year ago, and the results were interesting to say the least. However, the test, which showed my percentages at 87% European, 8% Native, and 5% African was lacking in some areas. The test is based on the 7 sisters of Africa, and my sister was Tara, who entered Europe from North Africa. Now, my mothers first cousin took a maternal line DNA test which is more conclusive. It shows that our maternal line is from the Barbers of Morocco. They were the Moors who entered Europe through Spain, and Portugal.
That is not the interesting part, I have another ancestor, who was from Guinea. Her people are the Malinke, and Mende Group, who were part of the Mali Empire. They were Muslim, and they were also Berbers from North Africa, who traveled the opposite direction, and settled in Guinea. My Great Great Grandmother, Leah Ruth Warner, was born in Guinea, and sold as a slave in South Carolina. Through her oral testimony I was able to connect to the Malinke in Guinea.
The DNA test I took in 2003 traced my Lewis family line from Virginia, through Breconshire Wales. Although this line is considered European they were part of the Moors who entered England with King Arthur (their documented line goes back to 462 AD). John Lewis migrated to Virginia in 1650, and his great-grandson, also named John Lewis was my direct ancestor. The DNA test proved this line, and some of the white Lewis line have assisted me with charts etc. So here we are with two lines, one coming out of Guinea, and the other coming out of Morocco, with a common thread, the Berbers.
Although I did write about my 2003 test in my book, the last test was not included. My brother took a male line DNA test for our paternal grandfather, and they found his pool in Columbia South America. This is soooo very interesting
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I am very intersted to make such a test since i am an Amazigh (the europeans call us Berbers but we never used this word among us)from Kabylie, in east of Algeria. In our region ,Blue and green eyes are common as well blond people. Algeria is a mosaic with population having different color depending on the region where they live. you may be surprised if i will tell you that even in the heart of sahara, you can meet blue eyes among the Touargue people (Also Amazigh) with a slightly dark skin. I was in Tunisia, exactly in Matmata and Timezret (two berber villages in Tunisia) where the language is still spoken and i have met there people with blue yes as well.
The europeans were wondering since the old times, back to Herodote, from where Berbers are coming. it's the same today. i showed to my colleagues pictures of my brothers and sisters with blue eyes and they were astonished! they thing White PEOPLE ARE ONLY EUROPEANS!!
IT'S INTERESTING TO TRACE THE HUMAN ADVENTURE SINCE OLD TIMES.
If you are living in the states, i would be pleased to discuss about the links between the Touaregue from Sahara and the Indians Red skins in the states. it's some thing i thought about when i was first time in a museum in Sahara.
Have a nice evening
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This should be no surprize. The term moors is very misleading. It is a European term. Berbers can be any color. People in Northern and Western Europe--and the US divide up people by color. No one else does.
We believe that thousands of years ago the Sahara was a grassland peopled with hunters and gatherers who were black. Gradually the Sahara dried up and the hunterers and gatherers retreated South. None the less trans-Saharan trade, contact and intermarriage, slave trade, etc continued. Slavery among the Berbers can't be compared to slavery in the US. Slaves were more of a caste, a way of integrationg people with no clan/caste relationships into the Berber social hierarchy. I am black and lived in Tunisia for two years. There are still pockets of Berber speakers in the South. And in towns were the caravans came in from the Sahara, the popultion is comprised of some of the every skin color imaginable.
Intermarriage is between light and dark skinned people in North Africa is very common.
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All her life, Rachel Fair has been teased by other black Americans about her light skin. "High yellow," they call her, a needling reference to the legacy of a slave owner who, she says, "went down to that cabin and had what he wanted."
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Steve Ruark for The New York Times Hayes Larkins
Tracing Roots to an Ancestral Land
Fabrizio Costantini for The New York Times Charles Larkins, whose great-grandmother was a slave, asked Hayes Larkins, above, the slave owner's white great-grandson, to take a DNA test to see if they are related. They await the results. So it was especially satisfying for Ms. Fair, 64, when a recent DNA test suggested that her mother's African ancestry traced nearly to the root of the human family tree, which originated there 150,000 years ago.
"More white is showing in the color, but underneath, I'm deepest Africa," said Ms. Fair, a retired parks supervisor in Cincinnati. "I tell my friends they're kind of Johnny-come-latelies on the DNA scale, so back up, back up."
Ms. Fair is one of thousands of African-Americans who have scraped cells from their inner cheeks and paid a growing group of laboratories to learn more about a family history once thought permanently obscured by slavery. They are seeking answers to questions about their family lineages in the antebellum South - whether black, white or Native American - and about distant forebears in Africa.
The DNA tests are fueling the biggest surge in African-American genealogy since Alex Haley's 1976 novel, "Roots," inspired a generation to try to trace their ancestors back to Africa. For those who have spent decades poring over plantation records that did not list slaves by surname and ship manifests that did not list where they came from, the idea that the key lies in their own bodies is a powerful one.
But the joy that often accompanies the answers from the tests is frequently tempered by the unexpected questions they raise. African-Americans say the tests can make the ugliness of slavery more palpable and leave the hunger for heritage unsatisfied. Some are unsure what to make of the new information about far-away kin, or how to account for genes that undermine a racial identity they have long internalized.
The interest in using genetics to construct a family tree comes despite warnings from scientists that the necessary tools to tell African-Americans what many want to know the most - precisely where in Africa their ancestors lived and what tribal group they belonged to - are still unreliable.
The most that blacks who use DNA tests can hope to learn now is that their genetic signature matches that of contemporary Africans from a given tribe or region from a DNA database that is far from complete. To assign an ancestral identity based on that match is highly suspect, scientists say; a group whose DNA has not been sampled may be a more precise match, or the person might match with several groups because of migration or tribal mixing.
Each test can also trace only one line of a person's many thousands of ancestors, making the results far more murky than the promise held out by some testing companies.
Still, the popularity of the DNA tests seems a testament to the unremitting craving for a story of origin. However flawed or scientifically questionable, the results provide the only clue many African-Americans have to the history and traditions that members of other American ethnic groups whose immigration was voluntary tend to take for granted.
"There's just something about knowing something after years of thinking it was impossible to know anything," said Melvin Collier, 32, a black student at Clark Atlanta University who recently learned that his DNA matches that of the Fulani people of Cameroon. "It's still pretty overwhelming."
Some African-Americans, more interested in searching out recent relatives who in many cases can be dependably identified with a DNA match, are asking whites whom they have long suspected are cousins to take a DNA test. And in a genetic bingo game that is delivering increasing returns as people of all ethnicities engage in DNA genealogy, some are typing their results into public databases on the Internet and finding a match that no paper trail would have revealed.
"I've been sitting here for years with nothing left to try and then, boom, this brand new thing," said B. J. Smothers, a retired urban planner in Stone Mountain, Ga., who says the results of a DNA test have brought her closer than she had ever been to discovering the identity of her father's grandfather. "DNA is our last hope."
Ms. Smothers's father, 88, knew that his father was born a slave in Wilcox County, Ala., but the DNA test showed that he has a European paternal ancestry, a result shared by nearly a third of African-Americans who take the test. The news was not exactly a surprise. But as eager as she is to discover the identity of her great-grandfather, Ms. Smothers is also bracing for a wave of new anger.
"I am kind of preparing myself for what I am going to feel when I find the family, when it's real," she said. She regularly looks for matches to her father's DNA in the online databases where amateur genealogists publish their genetic identities along with more prosaic contact information. Some day, she is certain, she will find a match that will lead to her white relatives.
Family reunions via DNA are not always warm affairs. When Trevis Hawkins, 37, a black oncology nurse from Montgomery, Ala., e-mailed a white man with the same surname whose DNA matched his this year, the man seemed excited. But after Mr. Hawkins gave him the address to his family Web site, which includes pictures, he never heard from him again.
One African-American, upon confirming a match with a white man whose ancestors had owned his, told him he owed reparations and could start by paying for the test, said Bennett Greenspan, chief executive of Family Tree DNA, which offers tests for $129 and up.
But Charles Larkins, whose great-grandmother was a slave, says proving or disproving his suspicion that her owner was his great-grandfather would be cathartic.
Mr. Larkins recently e-mailed Hayes Larkins, the slave owner's white great-grandson, to ask whether he would take the DNA test. Because the Y chromosome, which determines maleness, is passed virtually unchanged from father to son, scientists can use it to determine whether two men share a common ancestor.
"I'm not going to be like the Jefferson descendants, denying anything happened," Hayes Larkins said, referring to a 1998 DNA test that indicated that Thomas Jefferson had fathered at least one child with his slave Sally Hemings, which his white family had denied.
The two Mr. Larkins are waiting for the results to arrive.
For Nickesha Sanders, who already knew her great-great-grandfather was a white slave owner in Tennessee, the appeal of the DNA test was the promise of a link to Africa. "I wanted to be able to connect to my history before slavery," said Ms. Sanders, 26, a student at Texas Southern University. "I wanted it to be more than, the boat stopped at the shores, then slavery, emancipation, civil rights, all that struggle."
To find out about her maternal ancestors, Ms. Sanders paid $349 for a test that analyzes mitochondrial DNA, which is passed on largely intact from mothers to their children and serves a similar purpose as the Y chromosome for scientists tracing ancestry.
The results, from a Washington company, African Ancestry, indicated that Ms. Sanders shared a genetic profile with members of the Kru people of Liberia, who, she was pleased to learn, were known for inciting slave rebellions. But the news did not mean as much to her grandmother, who had hoped to find proof of the American Indian blood she had always been told ran in the family, a frequent quest for African-Americans taking the tests.
The results have propelled some test-takers to plan visits to their newly adopted homelands and to find others here who have been told they share the same ancestry. In online discussion forums, African-Americans with the same DNA test results call each other "cousin." After a lifetime of knowing only that their family came from Africa, some liken the new association to adopted children finding their birth mother.
"Africa is not a country; it's a continent," said LaVerne Nichols Hunter, a retired mathematics teacher in Pittsburgh, whose DNA test results placed her ancestors in Cameroon, Sierra Leone and Liberia.
But if DNA test-takers are making too much family history out of too little genetic information, social scientists say, it is not a phenomenon unique to the new technology.
"Identity is a process," said Alondra Nelson, a sociologist at Yale who studies the intersection of race and genetics. "Narratives and stories about family and kinship are always to some extent people making meaning out of their experiences with whatever tools they have."
When a radio host in Chicago revealed at a Kwanzaa festival last year that he was of Mende descent, several attendees who had received the same DNA result gathered to trade notes, a moment some said they found especially meaningful because slave owners made a point of separating Africans from the same tribes to prevent them from communicating.
But Kwame Bandele has learned enough about the civil war in Liberia, which the tribe his paternal DNA test identified is involved in, to feel deeply troubled by the kinship. A manager at General Electric, Mr. Bandele has tried to persuade the company to provide ultrasound machines for pregnant women in refugee camps.
He sends out e-mail with news about the war to friends, but feels he should be doing more.
"There was a massacre with machetes the other night," he said. "My people are in bad shape."
Ray Winbush, a psychology professor at Morgan State University, said being told that his ancestors hailed from the Takar people of Cameroon served to underscore his disconnectedness, both from an ancestral tribe he knows little about and from an American society that can still be a hostile place for African-Americans.
"It's like being lost and found at the same time," Mr. Winbush said.
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This is a wonderful story that I've never heard or read about before, this is a classic survival story.. . Thanx for the posts!
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posted
Your noble work is excellent! I am only saying that picking specific individuals who happen to not fit the 'mean/average' African phenotype is not a reflection of the main sample.
I known African Americans come in all variations of the rainbow but without having any evidence, can you name an area outside the Carolinas that would show Mende/Wolof/Berber influences? By this I am referring to cultural traditions, mores, ancestral weaving, basketmaking (I am not referring to written materials either, as per this thread)
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West African cooking is based on a fairly equal combination of whole grains (millet, brown rice) and fresh fruits and vegetables. These are complemented by an abundant use of nuts, legumes (beans, dried peas), and fish. Meats are used as a flavoring for other foods rather than being the "main event," and sweets are eaten only rarely. Herbs and chiles, rather than salt, provide flavor, and foods are cooked with healthy vegetable oils rather than animal fats like butter, lard, or fat back. This diet, along with lots of physical activity, closely mirrors the new food pyramid that researchers at the Harvard School of Medicine now maintain contributes to optimum health.
By contrast, the original North American Colonial diet was extremely unhealthy, consisting of mainly meat and (primarily refined) carbohydrates. African cooks helped to change this in the South. African ingredients are pervasive in Southern cooking, from the okra and seafood-based gumbos of Louisiana to Charleston's characteristic "Bene" sesame seed snacks, candies, and cakes. Every Southern cookbook, whether or not it labels itself as Soul Food, owes a debt for its healthier elements to the heartsick slaves who recreated a bit of home in their stews, cornbreads, and "mess o' greens."
Among the foods that Africans brought with them:
Black-eyed peas Pigeon peas Nutmeg Sesame Coffee Kola Watermelon Millet Pumpkins and squashes Yams Coconuts Okra (which reportedly was brought here by slaves who hid the seeds in their hair). Once they arrived, these talented and creative cooks made the following native North American ingredients their own:
Maize Collard and mustard greens (which were originally only given to animals) Cassava Pineapples Papayas Chiles Sweet potatoes Peanuts.
WEST AFRICAN LANGUAGE IN AMERICAN ENGLISH West African contributions to American culture are also evident in the number of food-related words with West African origins, such as:
Yam (from the Fulani word nyami, for "to eat)
Gumbo (from the word for okra in Wolof, Mandingo, and Bambara)
Benne or bene (from the Umbundu ad Tshiluba words for sesame).
Banana which comes from Africa by way of Portugal with spelling intact. Not only American English
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posted
In West Africa, historians and descendants of slaves brought to the Americas are looking for cultural links from both sides of the Atlantic In West Africa, historians and descendants of slaves brought to the Americas are looking for cultural links from both sides of the Atlantic. One example connects Senegal and what is known as Creole culture in the southern U.S. state of Louisiana.
But in another time, the door led to ships that carried captured Africans on the treacherous passage into slavery.
The father and daughter are African-Americans who have traveled from the United States. They trace their U.S. roots to the southern state of Mississippi.
"It would be neat and nice to be able to say, we are from this country, that country and meet some of the people in which we are family," said Honor. "And, I understand that we are talking about several generations, but still it gives you a place that you can call home."
To determine where to focus the hunt for family, Honor is looking to his DNA, the cellular material passed from parent to child that acts as a blueprint for how a cell, or a person, will develop. Scientists are able use this information to trace back generations, and pinpoint the birthplace of one's ancestors.
For many African-Americans, especially those from Louisiana, historians say, the search would start and end right here in Senegal.
Ibrahima Seck is a cultural historian, who teaches at University Cheikh Anta Diop in Dakar. He has spent the past few years excavating and renovating a former slave-owning plantation in southeastern Louisiana. He says the plan is to turn it into a museum.
He explains that about 70-percent of African slaves in the Mississippi River valley came from the part of west Africa that became Senegal and The Gambia. Many of them were members of the Wolof ethnic group.
"If you go to southwest Louisiana, you find thousands of people whose family name is Senegal," he said. "That means, originally, they were Wolof, because in the plantations of Louisiana, they were listed as Senegal, and those people chose to pick that family name after emancipation."
Elsewhere in North and South America, African slaves from disparate regions were thrown together. Forced to communicate across different languages and backgrounds, many old ways were abandoned. But, in Louisiana, a law required slave owners to keep parents and children together or on neighboring plantations. This enabled parents to pass on history and traditions to their children.
The culture that developed is called Creole, which was originally a linguistic term for the new language that arises in a place where speakers of two or more different languages live side-by-side.
Louisiana Creole originally developed from French and the African languages. France controlled Louisiana until 1804.
Creole is also the name given to the regional cuisine. Gumbo is a signature spicy dish featuring the green pod-like vegetable, okra. But in several Sene-gambian languages, Gumbo is the word for the vegetable itself, which features in many typical Senegalese dishes. Likewise, jambalaya is an American adaptation of what you would find in Senegalese households as "thiebu yapp," Wolof for rice with meat.
Cultural historian Seck says Louisianans can also look to Senegal for roots of their jazz music.
"If you look at the word 'jazz', you can find the word in at least three African languages: Wolof, Fulani, and Hasani, the language of the Moors of Mauritania, north of Senegal. The same word 'jazz', or 'jayz', when the Fulani say "jayz, that means dance, real dance," said Seck. "And, if you look at the early, real original jazz in New Orleans, it was dance music."
For Honor and his daughter, the search for family history has been full of surprises, including a big surprise in Honor's DNA. When the results were conveyed to him during his visit to Senegal, he learned that, on his father's side, his ancestors were not all African.
"It was amazing to have this guy tell you that your ancestors were Vikings and Scandinavians," said Honor. "And I said, 'He has got to be kidding.'"
Honor's African heritage, then, comes from his mother, whose DNA traces to Angola, which he hopes to visit someday.
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When one mentions Louisiana, many people think only of New Orleans and neglect other regions of the state. Many misunderstandings exist about the distinct and complex culture that evolved in this metropolitan center. Since first inhabited by Native Americans, New Orleans, like Louisiana as a whole, has been governed by the French, Spanish, and Americans, with each making distinctive contributions. In addition, other ethnic groups, in particular Africans (both French speaking African Creoles and English speaking African Americans), Italians (primarily Sicilian), Germans, and Irish, have also made significant contributions to the cultural landscape of the city. Today, New Orleans is a multicultural metropolis with significant communities of Jews, Latins (from throughout the Caribbean, Central and South America), Greeks, Haitians, Filipinos, and Asians, including the largest concentration of Vietnamese in the United States (Cooke and Blanton 1981).
Contrary to popular stereotyping, New Orleans is not a Cajun town, even though many Cajuns moved to New Orleans after World War II and grew to dominate certain parts of town, such as Westwego and Marrero on the West Bank. The first and largest migrations of the French to New Orleans were not Acadian. French nobles and army officers blended with the Spanish to create a Creole community. Creole, as used in New Orleans, refers either to the descendants of the French and Spanish settlers or to people of French, Spanish, and African descent who were known as gens de couleur libres or free people of color. These two groups were culturally intertwined, yet maintained separate identities. Most Africans in Louisiana arrived as slaves from Francophone West Africa, but later some arrived as free people of color from the Caribbean. Two thirds of the Africans arriving before 1730 were from the Senegambia region of West Africa. Senegambia was home to many culturally related groups with similar languages, but most Africans brought to Louisiana during this time were either Wolof or Bambara (Hall 1992). After the Haitian Revolution of 1791 1804, another influx of Africans, including many free people of color, arrived by way of the Caribbean. Most of these Africans from the Caribbean were originally from Dahomey (now the Republic of Benin) and Nigeria (Hunt 1988).
The significant number of Africans from closely related cultures enabled them to retain many cultural traits and contribute to the Creole culture that was developing in New Orleans and south Louisiana. For example, the Haitians brought the shotgun house and the voodoo religion to Louisiana. The word "voodoo" is derived from the African word voudun which means "deity" in Yoruba or "insight" in Fon (Bodin 1990). Free people of color dominated many building trades in New Orleans, were often highly educated, and as chefs played an important role in the development of Creole cuisine for which the city is known (Reinecke 1985). Okra, an important ingredient of gumbo, and the word "gumbo" itself (derived from Bantu nkombo) are African.
After the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, Americans, referred to as Les Americains, arrived and settled upriver or uptown from the Creole district of downtown with Canal Street being the dividing line. Irish fleeing the potato famine of the 1840s settled in the area which became known as the Irish Channel between the Mississippi River and the Uptown Garden District. The 1850s saw another influx of Germans. After the Civil War, even more English speaking African Americans arrived to join the population of freed slaves. The distinction between African Creoles and African Americans began to blur after 1918 (Reinecke 1985:58 59), but still today Louisianans at times refer to people not descended from the French or Creole culture as Americans. Jazz played a role in this cultural fusion because ethnic groups that did not otherwise mingle were drawn together through jazz. African Americans, African Creoles, Italians, Germans, and Irish were all instrumental in the development of this new art form. In New Orleans, musical traditions range from brass jazz bands to African Creole and African American Mardi Gras Indians chanting call responses that have been called the most African of all musics found in North America. African American Delta blues and Latin salsa are some of the most frequently heard musics today in local clubs, along with the distinctive New Orleans rhythm and blues made famous by the likes of Fats Domino, Professor Longhair, and the Neville Brothers (Smith 1990).
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Department of History, Millersville University of Pennsylvania.
Based largely on court and county documents as well as the recently published transatlantic slave database, Douglas Chambers uses the circumstances surrounding the 1732 death of Ambrose Madison, the paternal grandfather of President James Madison, to reconstruct the history of the Igbo slaves in Virginia. Thus, the book is primarily about the dominant role of enslaved Igbo in the formation of early Afro-Virginia slave culture and society. In the words of the author, it discusses "the process of historical creolization in eighteenth-century Virginia .. . .[which] effectively mean[s] the Igboization of slave community and culture" in the region (p. 18). The book breaks into two parts: part 1 consists of chapters 1-4, and part 2 consists of chapters 5-10.
Three slaves, two men and a woman, were accused of causing Madison's death by poisoning. They were tried and found guilty. While one of the accused, a male slave owned by a neighboring planter, was executed for his alleged lead role, the other two, owned by Madison, were punished by whipping and returned to his estate.
As a foundation for his thesis, Chambers attempts to trace the history of the enslaved Africans from their points of embarkation in the Bight of Biafra and, more specifically, Calabar to their disembarkation in Virginia. Thus, while part 1 of the study focuses on the Igbo and their culture and society during the era of the transatlantic slave trade, part 2 centers on the experiences of the enslaved in Virginia. The author argues that the emergence and expansion of Aro influence in Igbo region, as the foremost slave merchants, and the demise of Nri hegemony in the north-central Igbo region in the mid-eighteenth century resulted in increased exportation of Igbo people out of the Calabar and the Niger Delta ports.
According to the author's calculations, the Igbo accounted for about 1.3 million of the 1.7 million people exported from the Bight of Biafra during the era of the Atlantic slave trade. Out of a total of 37,000 Africans that arrived in Virginia from Calabar in the 1700s, 30,000 were Igbo (p. 23). The significance of this pattern of slave trade between Calabar and Virginia, Chamber argues, is that the increased exportation of enslaved Igbo from their homeland to the Chesapeake region coincided with the expansion of colonial settlement from the Upper Tidewater to the fertile Central Piedmont, an era when the transatlantic trade transformed the region into a slave society that was dominated by the Igbo and their culture.
In 1721, Ambrose Madison inherited an estate at Mt. Pleasant from his father-in-law. To secure title to this estate, he purchased newly imported African slaves and sent them there to clear and cultivate crops. In early 1732, he moved to the new estate with his family. Six months later, while still in his mid-thirties, he died, allegedly as a result of poison. As the author states, while Madison's biographers and hagiographers helped to create a general impression that he died a strange death at a very young age, his family members attributed his death to a poisoning conspiracy involving two of his slaves and an outside male slave. To buttress his claim that Igbo slaves were responsible for their master's death, Chambers, in a chapter of only five pages, attempts to link the use of poison as a weapon of slave resistance to the enslaved Igbo in Virginia and the Caribbean colonies.
This is very subjective, since the knowledge and use of plant medicines to heal the sick, placate the spirits and punish enemies and deviants was not the exclusive prerogative of the enslaved Igbo.
In part 2 of the book, which focuses on Virginia, the author delineates five phases of the creolization of Mt. Pleasant (later Montpelier), namely, the Charter generation (1720s-1730s), the Creolizing generation (1740s-1760s), the Creolized generation (1770s-1790s), the "Worriment" generation (1800s-1820s), and the Ruination generation (1830s-1850s). The charter generation of Atlantic Africans marked the development of Mt.
Pleasant as a regional slave community of the Madison family with twenty-nine slaves. It was an era when enslaved Africans employed their cultural heritage to adapt to their new environment. They not only employed their expertise in tropical agriculture to cultivate tobacco and corn, but also put into use their knowledge of herbs and plants to make preventive, curative, and poisonous medicines. Upon Madison's death, his family shared his slaves between his two quarters: the Home House and Black Level, an action which signifies a new settlement pattern.
The Creolizing generation of the Montpelier slave community saw a steady growth in the slave population, resulting largely from inheritance and births. Under the leadership of James Madison Sr., the family embarked on major construction projects that made each of their quarters resemble a small village. They also established large tobacco barns, corncrib, and a mill. Wealth generated through slave labor enabled Madison to enhance his economic and political status. For closer supervision and increased productivity, he broke his slaves into small workforces and deployed them annually to live in different quarters in a rotating order. However, following the building of the Home House and the slave quarter, the Walnut Grove, Madison brought many of his slaves to stay at the core Montpelier community in the late 1760s.
The Creolized generation (1770s-1790s) marked the high point of Montpelier as a slave community that was centered on the Walnut Grove, with over hundred slaves in the mid-1770s (p. 129). While tobacco remained the main export crop, Madison was able to diversify his business operations to include blacksmithing, carpentry, and brandy distilling. He also added wheat and hay to his list of crops. Before he died in 1801, Madison also invested in plows, scythes, and other grain-cultivating tools which facilitated increased production and specialization by the slaves.
The "Worriment" (1800s-1820s) and "Ruination" (1830s-1850s) generations marked the death of James Madison Sr., the disputes over the division of his estates, the first substantial separations of slaves from the home community, the death of President Madison, and the final divestment of what was left of the Montpelier community. By 1860, under a new owner, the Montpelier slave population had been so drastically reduced, either through intra- and inter-state slave trade or the manumission process, that only twenty slaves were left on the estate.
As the author aptly observes, in spite of the predominant role of enslaved Africans in the development of Mt. Pleasant and their contribution to the rise of the Madison family to regional prominence, historians have tended to overlook them, focusing on Montpelier only as the family home of President Madison. A few of the blacks mentioned in the historiography of the Madisons were Sawney, Billy Gardner, Granny Milly, Paul Jennings, and Surkey. Paul Jennings, who published a small pamphlet in 1865, was a sixteen-year-old house slave at the White House in 1814, attending to the president until his death, and Sawney accompanied the young James to his college in New Jersey and served as his manservant. He also served as an overseer, cultivated yams and cabbages, and raised chickens before his death in the 1830s.
In the last chapter, the author tries to reinforce his claims that Igbo slaves killed Ambrose Madison and that their predominance in Virginia gave them the opportunity to lay the foundation of the Afro-Virginian culture and community. For this purpose, he uses the personal names of the enslaved to mark their individuality and to connect them to the Montpelier slave community and the broader history of the region. The author mentions names such as Calabar (male), Eboe Sarah (female), Juba (male,) and Breechy (male). He also uses yams (a staple food) and okra (a vegetable) as evidence of the foodways of
Igbo origins, as well as "mojo" for charms, and the slave "Jonkonnu" (a Christmastime slave masquerade), all in the attempt to make a case for what he calls "creolized Igboism" in Virginia. Chambers also associates the eighteenth-century low-fired ceramic cooking pots and eating bowls (generally called colonoware) with the enslaved Igbo. According to the author, the "description of precolonial Igbo potting technology fits quite well with what is known of eighteenth-century Virginia colonoware . . . [and] gourds (calabashes) were another important Igbo material cultural item that continued in Virginia" (pp.172-173).
Other material culture the author lists in the book, as signifying Igbo connection, are dugout canoes, styles of fences, blue glass beads, and an iron sculpture which he claims evokes the kinds of figures made from wood or clay that littered southern Igbo "mbari" art or even "ikenga" (p.174). The author identifies musical instruments such as box drums and the "banjo" stringed instrument as uniquely Igbo. He also points to slave patterns of settlement, Igbo belief in reincarnation, the practice of not celebrating birthdays, and the nudity of enslaved children and youths as practices which resonated in Afro-Virginian culture and suggest the dominance of Igbo influence.
The author draws on the extreme lactose intolerance among Virginia's black adults of the nineteenth century and the related notion that the Igbo and Yoruba were the only major African ethnic groups with a known lactose intolerance (p.186). In addition, he says that the high proportion of Igbo women in the colony might have given them disproportionate influence in the socialization of Creole children.
As a counter-thesis to that of the author, it should be noted that yam-growing was and is not peculiar to the Igbo; more importantly, North American yams are actually sweet potatoes, not the "genus Dioscorea" associated with West Africa. Similarly, the paraphernalia associated with the Christmastime slave masquerades that the author links with the Igbo were actually more related to mid-twentieth-century Kalabari masks.
As for calabashes, as the author notes, these were used as gourds in Virginia; by contrast, calabashes were used as cups, bowls, and drinking ladles in Igbo society. Regarding musical instruments, while many central African peoples called their version of stringed gourd "mbanza", there is no Igbo name for the musical instrument the author identifies as "banjo." The author believes that most of the enslaved Igbo who came from Calabar were from the north-central Igbo region, the home to the famous Umudioka woodcarvers.
I would argue that the absence of carved doors and panels in Virginia undermines the idea of a north-central Igbo provenance of Calabar slaves and a pervasive Igbo presence and culture there. While there may be some credibility in the above claims, it is apparent that some of the cultural practices attributed to the Igbo in this study were neither unique nor exclusive to them. To start with, the Igbo were not the only enslaved Africans who originated from the Niger Delta and Calabar ports, and ended up in Virginia. There were also the Ibibio, the Efik, the Andoni, the Ubani, the Okrika, the Kalabari, and, later, the Ejagham, the Ekoi, the Idoma, the Igala, and even the Hausa and Nupe--captives from the nineteenth-century Muslim-engineered wars.
Besides, Virginia had slaves from the Yoruba, the Akan area, Mande, Fulani, Angola, the Congo basin, and Madagascar. The period covered by the book also coincided with the Islamic militancy of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in the Senegambia, an upheaval that resulted in the enslavement of the natives.
Virginia was, in other words, a very multi-ethnic slave society. The lack of attention to other Africans in Virginia and the related neglect of their obvious contributions to the development of the region is a major weakness of this study.
It is clear that the author's interpretation and analysis was handicapped by his limited knowledge of Igbo history, culture,e and language. For instance, he erroneously regards the Nri as the "first Igbo" (pp. 36-38) and treats them as founders and leaders of the entire Igbo nation. This explains why he spends considerable time in discussing the Nri kinglist and genealogical history, which is less important for purposes of his study; the book would have benefited more if he had instead focused on the Aro, Nike, Abam, Aboh, Ngwa, Ndoki, Nkwerre, and others who participated in the transatlantic slave trade. It is also erroneous to claim that the Nri were the only people in Igbo society with the power to cleanse abominations. The author asserts that the "expansion of Aro merchant warlord settlements" (p. 35) in the mid-eighteenth century led to the growing power of client village groups within Nri area. However, no examples of such Aro-client villages in north-central Igbo region are provided.
It is misleading to suggest that there was no cassava in the region until the twentieth century and that "fufu in Igboland was invariably made of yams, not cassava" (p. 40). Cassava was introduced in different parts of Igbo region at different points in time. While some areas started cultivating and processing the crop in the third quarter of the nineteenth century, others adopted it in the twentieth century.
Moreover, fufu was also made from cocoyam, unripe plantain, and banana and, later, cassava. The incident attributed to the "Nkwerre," who supposedly plundered Onitsha women traders when they brought European goods to the Nkwerre markets, and the author's interpretation and suggestion that the women were molested for usurping males' trading prerogative that violated Nkwerre taboo, are examples of his limited knowledge of Igbo society and history. The town in question was Nkwelle, which is twenty miles from Onitsha, not Nkwerre, which is much farther away. Moreover, Onitsha women were famed traders who not only bought and sold local and European goods, but also had direct commercial relations with European merchants from the moment the latter arrived in Onitsha.
As studies on the development of trade and commerce in the Onitsha region show, it was not until the twentieth century that Onitsha men, who regarded trade as women's work, began to take part in trade with the European firms.
The author's claim that "Igbo people brought the term ['buckra'] into English" (p. 110), as in "buckra ," a term used by slaves to refer to their white masters, is doubtful. While "buckra" might be a corruption of Ibibio "mbakara" ("mb" equals plural; "kara" equals to encircle, rule, or abuse), one cannot see the connection of this word with the Igbo. Similarly, he suggests that the slave name "Juba" was Igbo (meaning: "ji" for yam and "uba" for canoe, literally translated to mean "yam barn"), "and that Juba" could actually be translated into Igbo words for "ask /enquire," or "refuse," or "possession of wealth" (ji-uba), or "plentiful yam." It is more likely that "Juba" was an Akan name (as in the case of Akan female name in South Carolina and Jamaica) than Igbo name.
In spite of the drawbacks I have pointed out, and occasional typographical errors, the author has assiduously provided an African-centered perspective that helps in our understanding of the circumstances surrounding the death of Ambrose Madison in 1732 and the development of his family into a prominent regional, and indeed, national economic and political power, as well as the contributions of his slaves in achieving these feats and to the foundation and growth of slave culture and society in Virginia. The book represents a limited but significant contribution to the history and historiography of slavery and, therefore, a valuable resource to students and scholars in the study
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Department of History, Millersville University of Pennsylvania.
Based largely on court and county documents as well as the recently published transatlantic slave database, Douglas Chambers uses the circumstances surrounding the 1732 death of Ambrose Madison, the paternal grandfather of President James Madison, to reconstruct the history of the Igbo slaves in Virginia. Thus, the book is primarily about the dominant role of enslaved Igbo in the formation of early Afro-Virginia slave culture and society. In the words of the author, it discusses "the process of historical creolization in eighteenth-century Virginia .. . .[which] effectively mean[s] the Igboization of slave community and culture" in the region (p. 18). The book breaks into two parts: part 1 consists of chapters 1-4, and part 2 consists of chapters 5-10.
Three slaves, two men and a woman, were accused of causing Madison's death by poisoning. They were tried and found guilty. While one of the accused, a male slave owned by a neighboring planter, was executed for his alleged lead role, the other two, owned by Madison, were punished by whipping and returned to his estate.
As a foundation for his thesis, Chambers attempts to trace the history of the enslaved Africans from their points of embarkation in the Bight of Biafra and, more specifically, Calabar to their disembarkation in Virginia. Thus, while part 1 of the study focuses on the Igbo and their culture and society during the era of the transatlantic slave trade, part 2 centers on the experiences of the enslaved in Virginia. The author argues that the emergence and expansion of Aro influence in Igbo region, as the foremost slave merchants, and the demise of Nri hegemony in the north-central Igbo region in the mid-eighteenth century resulted in increased exportation of Igbo people out of the Calabar and the Niger Delta ports.
According to the author's calculations, the Igbo accounted for about 1.3 million of the 1.7 million people exported from the Bight of Biafra during the era of the Atlantic slave trade. Out of a total of 37,000 Africans that arrived in Virginia from Calabar in the 1700s, 30,000 were Igbo (p. 23). The significance of this pattern of slave trade between Calabar and Virginia, Chamber argues, is that the increased exportation of enslaved Igbo from their homeland to the Chesapeake region coincided with the expansion of colonial settlement from the Upper Tidewater to the fertile Central Piedmont, an era when the transatlantic trade transformed the region into a slave society that was dominated by the Igbo and their culture.
In 1721, Ambrose Madison inherited an estate at Mt. Pleasant from his father-in-law. To secure title to this estate, he purchased newly imported African slaves and sent them there to clear and cultivate crops. In early 1732, he moved to the new estate with his family. Six months later, while still in his mid-thirties, he died, allegedly as a result of poison. As the author states, while Madison's biographers and hagiographers helped to create a general impression that he died a strange death at a very young age, his family members attributed his death to a poisoning conspiracy involving two of his slaves and an outside male slave. To buttress his claim that Igbo slaves were responsible for their master's death, Chambers, in a chapter of only five pages, attempts to link the use of poison as a weapon of slave resistance to the enslaved Igbo in Virginia and the Caribbean colonies.
This is very subjective, since the knowledge and use of plant medicines to heal the sick, placate the spirits and punish enemies and deviants was not the exclusive prerogative of the enslaved Igbo.
In part 2 of the book, which focuses on Virginia, the author delineates five phases of the creolization of Mt. Pleasant (later Montpelier), namely, the Charter generation (1720s-1730s), the Creolizing generation (1740s-1760s), the Creolized generation (1770s-1790s), the "Worriment" generation (1800s-1820s), and the Ruination generation (1830s-1850s). The charter generation of Atlantic Africans marked the development of Mt.
Pleasant as a regional slave community of the Madison family with twenty-nine slaves. It was an era when enslaved Africans employed their cultural heritage to adapt to their new environment. They not only employed their expertise in tropical agriculture to cultivate tobacco and corn, but also put into use their knowledge of herbs and plants to make preventive, curative, and poisonous medicines. Upon Madison's death, his family shared his slaves between his two quarters: the Home House and Black Level, an action which signifies a new settlement pattern.
The Creolizing generation of the Montpelier slave community saw a steady growth in the slave population, resulting largely from inheritance and births. Under the leadership of James Madison Sr., the family embarked on major construction projects that made each of their quarters resemble a small village. They also established large tobacco barns, corncrib, and a mill. Wealth generated through slave labor enabled Madison to enhance his economic and political status. For closer supervision and increased productivity, he broke his slaves into small workforces and deployed them annually to live in different quarters in a rotating order. However, following the building of the Home House and the slave quarter, the Walnut Grove, Madison brought many of his slaves to stay at the core Montpelier community in the late 1760s.
The Creolized generation (1770s-1790s) marked the high point of Montpelier as a slave community that was centered on the Walnut Grove, with over hundred slaves in the mid-1770s (p. 129). While tobacco remained the main export crop, Madison was able to diversify his business operations to include blacksmithing, carpentry, and brandy distilling. He also added wheat and hay to his list of crops. Before he died in 1801, Madison also invested in plows, scythes, and other grain-cultivating tools which facilitated increased production and specialization by the slaves.
The "Worriment" (1800s-1820s) and "Ruination" (1830s-1850s) generations marked the death of James Madison Sr., the disputes over the division of his estates, the first substantial separations of slaves from the home community, the death of President Madison, and the final divestment of what was left of the Montpelier community. By 1860, under a new owner, the Montpelier slave population had been so drastically reduced, either through intra- and inter-state slave trade or the manumission process, that only twenty slaves were left on the estate.
As the author aptly observes, in spite of the predominant role of enslaved Africans in the development of Mt. Pleasant and their contribution to the rise of the Madison family to regional prominence, historians have tended to overlook them, focusing on Montpelier only as the family home of President Madison. A few of the blacks mentioned in the historiography of the Madisons were Sawney, Billy Gardner, Granny Milly, Paul Jennings, and Surkey. Paul Jennings, who published a small pamphlet in 1865, was a sixteen-year-old house slave at the White House in 1814, attending to the president until his death, and Sawney accompanied the young James to his college in New Jersey and served as his manservant. He also served as an overseer, cultivated yams and cabbages, and raised chickens before his death in the 1830s.
In the last chapter, the author tries to reinforce his claims that Igbo slaves killed Ambrose Madison and that their predominance in Virginia gave them the opportunity to lay the foundation of the Afro-Virginian culture and community. For this purpose, he uses the personal names of the enslaved to mark their individuality and to connect them to the Montpelier slave community and the broader history of the region. The author mentions names such as Calabar (male), Eboe Sarah (female), Juba (male,) and Breechy (male). He also uses yams (a staple food) and okra (a vegetable) as evidence of the foodways of
Igbo origins, as well as "mojo" for charms, and the slave "Jonkonnu" (a Christmastime slave masquerade), all in the attempt to make a case for what he calls "creolized Igboism" in Virginia. Chambers also associates the eighteenth-century low-fired ceramic cooking pots and eating bowls (generally called colonoware) with the enslaved Igbo. According to the author, the "description of precolonial Igbo potting technology fits quite well with what is known of eighteenth-century Virginia colonoware . . . [and] gourds (calabashes) were another important Igbo material cultural item that continued in Virginia" (pp.172-173).
Other material culture the author lists in the book, as signifying Igbo connection, are dugout canoes, styles of fences, blue glass beads, and an iron sculpture which he claims evokes the kinds of figures made from wood or clay that littered southern Igbo "mbari" art or even "ikenga" (p.174). The author identifies musical instruments such as box drums and the "banjo" stringed instrument as uniquely Igbo. He also points to slave patterns of settlement, Igbo belief in reincarnation, the practice of not celebrating birthdays, and the nudity of enslaved children and youths as practices which resonated in Afro-Virginian culture and suggest the dominance of Igbo influence.
The author draws on the extreme lactose intolerance among Virginia's black adults of the nineteenth century and the related notion that the Igbo and Yoruba were the only major African ethnic groups with a known lactose intolerance (p.186). In addition, he says that the high proportion of Igbo women in the colony might have given them disproportionate influence in the socialization of Creole children.
As a counter-thesis to that of the author, it should be noted that yam-growing was and is not peculiar to the Igbo; more importantly, North American yams are actually sweet potatoes, not the "genus Dioscorea" associated with West Africa. Similarly, the paraphernalia associated with the Christmastime slave masquerades that the author links with the Igbo were actually more related to mid-twentieth-century Kalabari masks.
As for calabashes, as the author notes, these were used as gourds in Virginia; by contrast, calabashes were used as cups, bowls, and drinking ladles in Igbo society. Regarding musical instruments, while many central African peoples called their version of stringed gourd "mbanza", there is no Igbo name for the musical instrument the author identifies as "banjo." The author believes that most of the enslaved Igbo who came from Calabar were from the north-central Igbo region, the home to the famous Umudioka woodcarvers.
I would argue that the absence of carved doors and panels in Virginia undermines the idea of a north-central Igbo provenance of Calabar slaves and a pervasive Igbo presence and culture there. While there may be some credibility in the above claims, it is apparent that some of the cultural practices attributed to the Igbo in this study were neither unique nor exclusive to them. To start with, the Igbo were not the only enslaved Africans who originated from the Niger Delta and Calabar ports, and ended up in Virginia. There were also the Ibibio, the Efik, the Andoni, the Ubani, the Okrika, the Kalabari, and, later, the Ejagham, the Ekoi, the Idoma, the Igala, and even the Hausa and Nupe--captives from the nineteenth-century Muslim-engineered wars.
Besides, Virginia had slaves from the Yoruba, the Akan area, Mande, Fulani, Angola, the Congo basin, and Madagascar. The period covered by the book also coincided with the Islamic militancy of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in the Senegambia, an upheaval that resulted in the enslavement of the natives.
Virginia was, in other words, a very multi-ethnic slave society. The lack of attention to other Africans in Virginia and the related neglect of their obvious contributions to the development of the region is a major weakness of this study.
It is clear that the author's interpretation and analysis was handicapped by his limited knowledge of Igbo history, culture,e and language. For instance, he erroneously regards the Nri as the "first Igbo" (pp. 36-38) and treats them as founders and leaders of the entire Igbo nation. This explains why he spends considerable time in discussing the Nri kinglist and genealogical history, which is less important for purposes of his study; the book would have benefited more if he had instead focused on the Aro, Nike, Abam, Aboh, Ngwa, Ndoki, Nkwerre, and others who participated in the transatlantic slave trade. It is also erroneous to claim that the Nri were the only people in Igbo society with the power to cleanse abominations. The author asserts that the "expansion of Aro merchant warlord settlements" (p. 35) in the mid-eighteenth century led to the growing power of client village groups within Nri area. However, no examples of such Aro-client villages in north-central Igbo region are provided.
It is misleading to suggest that there was no cassava in the region until the twentieth century and that "fufu in Igboland was invariably made of yams, not cassava" (p. 40). Cassava was introduced in different parts of Igbo region at different points in time. While some areas started cultivating and processing the crop in the third quarter of the nineteenth century, others adopted it in the twentieth century.
Moreover, fufu was also made from cocoyam, unripe plantain, and banana and, later, cassava. The incident attributed to the "Nkwerre," who supposedly plundered Onitsha women traders when they brought European goods to the Nkwerre markets, and the author's interpretation and suggestion that the women were molested for usurping males' trading prerogative that violated Nkwerre taboo, are examples of his limited knowledge of Igbo society and history. The town in question was Nkwelle, which is twenty miles from Onitsha, not Nkwerre, which is much farther away. Moreover, Onitsha women were famed traders who not only bought and sold local and European goods, but also had direct commercial relations with European merchants from the moment the latter arrived in Onitsha.
As studies on the development of trade and commerce in the Onitsha region show, it was not until the twentieth century that Onitsha men, who regarded trade as women's work, began to take part in trade with the European firms.
The author's claim that "Igbo people brought the term ['buckra'] into English" (p. 110), as in "buckra ," a term used by slaves to refer to their white masters, is doubtful. While "buckra" might be a corruption of Ibibio "mbakara" ("mb" equals plural; "kara" equals to encircle, rule, or abuse), one cannot see the connection of this word with the Igbo. Similarly, he suggests that the slave name "Juba" was Igbo (meaning: "ji" for yam and "uba" for canoe, literally translated to mean "yam barn"), "and that Juba" could actually be translated into Igbo words for "ask /enquire," or "refuse," or "possession of wealth" (ji-uba), or "plentiful yam." It is more likely that "Juba" was an Akan name (as in the case of Akan female name in South Carolina and Jamaica) than Igbo name.
In spite of the drawbacks I have pointed out, and occasional typographical errors, the author has assiduously provided an African-centered perspective that helps in our understanding of the circumstances surrounding the death of Ambrose Madison in 1732 and the development of his family into a prominent regional, and indeed, national economic and political power, as well as the contributions of his slaves in achieving these feats and to the foundation and growth of slave culture and society in Virginia. The book represents a limited but significant contribution to the history and historiography of slavery and, therefore, a valuable resource to students and scholars in the study
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Marks and objects in cemeteries that look merely decorative to the uninformed eye may be African signs and symbols. This iconography in cemeteries can be divided into three categories: 1) sign systems of African origins, 2) secular objects as surrogates for ideograms and 3) revival of African traditions, interpreted in new ways. Examples of such African retentions (subconscious transmissions from prior generations) exist in burial grounds and established cemeteries, particularly in the Southern United States.
A cemetery in George Washington National Forest in Amherst County, Va., is a good example. For decades, observers have commented that the gravestones had “strange marks.” Recently, these marks have been identified by this writer as African ideograms originating in Nigeria. The gravestones are inscribed with what appears to be Nsibidi, an Igbo writing system, confirming the survival of Igbo traditions during the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Made of high-quality blue slate indigenous to the area and mined from a local quarry, the stones show little damage from weather or time. Subsequently, the place was named the “Seventeen Stones Cemetery.”
The stones were probably engraved between 1770 to 1830, when the Igbo Diaspora was at its height in Virginia. At that time, the Igbo people comprised approximately 70 percent of the blacks in Virginia, a larger percentage than in any other Southern state.
A star symbol at the top of one stone, signifying “congress” or “unity” has similarities to the Kongo cosmogram that depicts the life cycle of birth, life, death and the afterlife. The cosmogram symbol has equal perpendicular crossbars or lines, sometimes contained in a diamond shape or a circle. Here, the linear symbol in the lower register appears to be a combination of the sign for “individual” and “this land is mine.” Together the signs mean the deceased has joined the realm of the ancestors. Both symbols are enclosed in a rectangle, denoting their association. A line separating the symbols emphasizes they are separate but one.
Igbo ideograms were important elements of religious practice and served as mnemonic devices associated with religion and with moral and historical narratives. In Igbo death and burial traditions, Nsibidi symbols honoring the ancestors were thought to protect the deceased. The most appropriate place to honor one’s forefathers was the cemetery. At times, the deceased were consulted for help with day-to-day problems. Items such as chickens, rum and schnapps were offered as gifts for the deceased during a grave-side ceremony.
For approximately 150 years, Africans fled enslavement on Southern plantations and lived autonomously in Florida, using discrete African art forms, traditions, and sensibilities in their modes of communications, rituals, subsistence strategies, and battle plans to prosper and achieve and sustain their freedom and autonomy. This article reconstructs the ways cultural forms and practices, such as àrokò, nsibidi, tusona or sona (ideographic writing systems), and mmomomme twe and ogede (incantations), functioned in these self-emancipated Africans’ stratagems to escape from Spanish, British, and American plantations; thrive socially and economically in the autonomous settlements they established; elude recapture; and defeat their former enslavers and other foe militarily despite their adversaries’ incessant onslaughts, advanced artillery, manpower, and economic advantages.
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Types of Art:Due to the diversity of the Igbo people, it is impossible to generalize about a pure Igbo art style, which has characteristically been representative of numerous geographical regions. It could be said, though, that most Igbo do carve and use masks, but the function of these masks vary from village to village. They are famous for Mbari architecture.
History:It is believed that the Igbo originated in an area about 100 miles north of their current location at the confluence of the Niger and Benue Rivers. They share linguistic ties with their neighbors the Bini, Igala, Yoruba, and Idoma, with the split between them probably occurring between five and six thousand years ago. The first Igbo in the region may have moved onto the Awka-Orlu plateau between four and five thousand years ago, before the emergence of sedentary agricultural practices. As this early group expanded, so too did the Igbo kingdom. The earliest surviving Igbo art forms are from the 10th century (Igbo Ukwu), and the fine quality of those copper alloy castings suggest that Igbo society had already achieved a level of technology rivaling contemporary Europeans.
Economy:The majority of Igbo are farmers. Their staple crop is yam, and its harvesting is a time for great celebration. They are able to produce yam efficiently enough to export it to their neighbors. With the assistance of migrant labor, they also harvest the fruit of the palm tree, which is processed into palm oil, and exported to Europe in large quantities, making it a fairly profitable cash crop.
Political Systems:The Igbo are a politically fragmented group, with numerous divisions resulting from geographic differences. There are also various subgroups delineated in accordance with clan, lineage, and village affiliations. They have no centralized chieftaincy, hereditary aristocracy, or kingship customs, as can be found among their neighbors. Instead, the responsibility of leadership has traditionally been left to the village councils, which include the heads of lineages, elders, titled men, and men who have established themselves economically within the community. It is possible for an Igbo man, through personal success, to become the nominal leader of the council.
Religion:As a result of regional and political fragmentation, which is mirrored in the several distinct languages traditionally spoken by the hundreds of different village groups, it would be reductionist to attempt to illustrate the traditional religious practices of the Igbo as a whole. Before the influence of Europeans and Christian missions, however, most Igbo practiced some form of ancestor worship, which held that in order to gain success in this world, one must appease of the spirits of the deceased. This might be accomplished in any number of ways. One of the primary ways of showing respect for the dead was through participation in the secret men's society, Mmo, which is the name used only in the northern part of Igbo land. In other parts, similar societies exist under different names. The second level of initiates was responsible for carrying out the funeral ceremonies for the deceased and inducting the departed spirits into the ebe mmo, so that they would no longer cause mischief in the village.
Credits: Christopher D. Roy also see credit page Professor of the History of Art The University of Iowa http://www.uiowa.edu/~africart
gateway-africa.de / travelgateway.info
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In my recent article on Hebrew [Ibo] in Nigeria , I was intrigued by numerous responses that followed this deep conversation thereafter—including emails from around the world Nigeria and Diaspora on this topic. The interest is indeed overwhelming to say the least. This writer congratulates all who have contributed in the conversation insofar, NVS and other website gridlocks. Alas, the writer did not escape anti-Semites or antagonizers, as they responded in their multitudes, however. Essentially, it is kind to remark that these responses actually balanced things out to almost perfection to meet objectives: awareness of who we are to our nation and to other nations in Nigeria and beyond.
Recently, I have been privileged to lay my hands on yet additional anthropological, archeological and spiritual documentations and, decided to use this space and time to act on them thus facilitating this production: WE ARE HEBREW [IBO] FIRST BORN, THE INHERITANCE OF GOD: WHAT ARE YOU AND WHAT IS YOUR INHERITANCE [PART THREE].
Hopefully, this additional information will elucidate better climate for a better understanding of Ndi-igbo [Ndi-Hebrew] in Nigeria and our fathers land—Jerusalem. Again, this conversation is about the nation: Igbo. Nothing against other nations in Nigeria—but rather, this paper will assist us live/understand each other better and together with this understanding build stronger and God fearing habitation[s] for one another.
Preserving our Heritage, tradition and Yahaduth [Judaism] in far land— Nigeria
Information has it that even before the arrival of colonial masters in Niger area now known as Nigeria-state—Igbo practiced their religion and worshiped God unadulterated until they intermingled and mix-cultures with ingenious people called Kwa or Kwa-people. This bastardization or adulteration of our religion, a-washed with local pagan-practices, and lose of Torah and more interrupted Jewish practice among Ndi-igbo. Worshiping of foreign gods was antithetical to the pure worship of a true and a living God, not a dead god.
About 1500, record show that they [Ndi-igbo or Ndi-Hebrew] built and consecrated their sanctuaries unto God and for lack of name called it—“ Traditional Church .” In fact, a lot of things happened. Even its name were corrupted—from, Ivri to Ibo or Igbo. It is important that we visit some achieves:
“There are two theories in regard to the Jewish heritage of the Igbos. One theory states that as early Ivrim (Hebrews) migrated into Nigeria , the moniker by which they were called by outsiders was corrupted from Ivri to Ibo or Igbo. A second part to this theory has it that Igbo is derived from the name of a Semitic ancestor of the Igbo people. A similar name (Aibo) can be found in the name of the amora Rav Abba Ben Ibo (better known as Rav) founder of the great yeshivas at Sura in Bavel ( Babylon ). [i][2] The second theory is that Igbo society may have been already established before Jewish migrations into the region. This theory goes on to state that as Jews made their way into West Africa and that they intermingled with certain Igbo ethnic groups and thus only certain Igbo families have Jewish descent while others may have converted or were influenced by the Jewish presence in the society.
Most Igbos profess a belief system about which a partial description of can be found in the writings of Olaudah Equiano titled, "Interesting Narratives of Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa the African, 1789." This belief system is believed to be that of an early form of the Israeli faith before and during the early stages of when the people of Israel settled in Canaan . This system, as described by Olaudah Equiano, has for some Igbo been fused with Christianity due to the push of missionaries into West Africa . Yet, there was a minority group that still clung on to the older purer version, which is believed to be the core of the Igbo Jewish heritage.” Please find enclosed pictures for your use in this direction and perhaps it will help all to review and make their individual and or collective-assessments for further studies and inquiries.
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